My Blue Bucket of Gold
by ninety6tears
Summary: Max returns to the Citadel to arrange an exchange of favors, but his end of a deal with Furiosa, as well as rising concern for the Dag's struggles, proves to be much more than he bargained for. New beginnings promise healing, but some old habits are hard to wash out. (Furiosa/Max)
1. Chapter 1

In her dreams there was only water where blood should be. It poured from wounds, from the sky, from his cupped hands to her mouth. This easy drip of rain was a sigh of safety through her sleep, but when she woke it became uneasy, too foreign a feeling. The same every night, cool and clear and light, until she woke in the gum of her lungs in early twilight, her breathing still twisted by sick.

She'd been told she would heal fast once the infection was staved, or so Hernina, now their one good excuse for a healer, had said. Though she'd had enough triumph in her to stand when they got back to the Citadel, and help doing it, now she still needed so much sleep, and only her own spine for it when she did get up. All things considered, it was a sleep of relief, enough to make her well again.

The first of the old War Boys to make any kind of self-initiated reparation was a green one named Ro-Ro, whom she scolded for attempting to bow to her on a couple occasions, the second of which provoked her to say, "A little lower so my knee can kiss your jaw." After that he seemed to get the message. It was him she asked to bring her the crutch and to help her down the winch to the Hand, as they'd called the tunneled wing of the middle level of the Citadel where all the blackthumbs and craftspeople worth a rock to sleep under had stayed. The area was being given over to the two pregnant women and the elderly and their families, which was all for the better, but when she thought of one person's living space being ransacked once it was found empty, something raked at her insides.

Ro-Ro didn't follow her past the winch or do anything to draw attention, just as she'd instructed. She'd waited for the time that night would be closing in so that the light wouldn't allow many people to recognize her.

As she strode forward at a pace that disguised her pains, there was such a tangle of strange elated activity all around that she couldn't imagine anything could have demanded that old fearful respect she brought out of people. A group was helping to fold up some of the oiled patchwork tarps that they used now to trap stray splashes of water on the bottom level, all of them spread around the long circle, synchronous in movements and sung notes as they were all trying to learn the same sand shanty. One backed up into her briefly, then fixed her direction with a tickled sound without even a slight apology.

She was relieved, almost excited: she'd spotted the familiar cloth slacked up from the pulley hook it shared with the torch sconce that rotated in the floor to tighten the tapestry into a charted wall so flat you could ink notes and maps onto the surface. It looked loosened, but undisturbed.

There was a certain still weather just behind the curtain when she pulled it aside to step into the musty space.

That late night came back to her, of coming to say, "The plans have changed. I think if I'm seen here that morning, they'll think you helped." However much good that did in its last-minute reluctance: since someone must have seen her coming here to see her at all in the past couple moons, they would have known, no question, or at least it would have made no difference in how she was treated in the witch hunt whether they really knew for sure.

With the patience of believing she was owed nothing but for Furiosa to come anyway, Doc Lock had stood up from the mess of tin boxes on the floor and pressed a small key into her palm. Furiosa instinctively put it in the pocket just inside her left pant leg, translating the motion to what looked like counting her bullets even though she knew Lock had checked for eyes before handing it to her. "What's this?"

"For the paddy," she said, motioning to the narrow metal chest with a padlock that had seen newer days. "After it's done, it'll be in there. And I'm to oil the cogs that day, so we won't be seeing each other in the morning either way."

Furiosa wanted to emphasize more strongly that there were so many obstacles that meant she just couldn't hope too hard to make it up here to get the thing, much less stow it off without anyone being too curious about what she was carrying, while also orchestrating the distraction—or the back-up distraction—that would make it possible for Angharad and the others to get into the Rig. But then, she almost sneered at herself at how stupid it would sound to suggest Doc Lock couldn't do anything about losing a key.

Lock had told Furiosa to leave the key in her apron after she got the yoke—when she got it— and they'd said their goodbyes. And now she stood there again, the key sitting in her palm, the chest on the floor promising the thing she only had asked for because she thought for sure she would never be coming back, and which it was strange to only claim now in her return, after the making of it might as well have killed Doc Lock.

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"I didn't know you'd had another one made," Capable said.

Furiosa had been trying it on when Capable showed up in the infirmary and stumbled in on the moment, and then without a word moved closer to give a gesture offering to help her find the right adjustment for the harness, which was fitted with a softer and more intricate attachment of buckled leathers than she was used to; she was waved off with a brief signal.

"I don't know too well how to fix one," Furiosa said simply, "and much less how to make a new one." She neglected to mention anything about Doc Lock; none of the women had ever asked her something so direct as how she happened to come by the limb. Let the kid assume such a contraption could be thrown from a week's work rather than get into how it came to be in the citadel under a disappeared woman's blanket.

Capable jumped a bit as the extension snapped the hand to an open set of claws, fast enough that Furiosa was also surprised. She smiled a little, and Furiosa met it with the corner of her mouth. "Toss me something."

Capable removed the thin shrug from her new multi-layered rags of warm colors. Furiosa backed behind her bed and Capable launched it underhand: if the release had been quick, the opposing action somehow was loaded off just as tight a spring. She didn't swing the angle quite right, but the fingers snapped it out of descent much faster than her phantom muscle memory could adjust to. This one would almost be dangerous until she got used to its handling.

"Careful with those talons," Hernina said in amazement on her way by.

Capable took her rag back when Furiosa tossed it, testing the arm's underhand. It went fine, but there was the slightest hitch, a tough stop somewhere in the movement that resonated straight to the same part of her mind that would have sensed it if something was causing the slightest drag on the rig. She could have guessed it: when she tried to retract, the elbow joint whined, jammed.

Capable noticed. "Is something wrong with it?"

Half-teasing but a little cold, Furiosa asked, "Shouldn't you be telling your fables to the sick?" When she turned back around from taking the offending relic off and wrapping it up under her blankets with a kind of exasperated ginger care, Capable had left her under her curtain of linen. She wondered, only for a breath, if her old charge was supposed to be a friend now.

Her thoughts abrasive, she lay down on one side; those thoughts unyielding rock, she turned onto the other hip. Someone was humming a meandering melody. She followed it into the oasis that would make her wake with thoughts of thirst.

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The crowds didn't part for the traveler when he arrived close to dusk. He offered help for some undisturbed shelter, to an elderly woman who squinted at him in uncertain, half-formed recognition.

It was two days there he took, helping her to carry her bags of crop and to get the cooking done in time, before he gave a question in return. "Is there a price for meeting with the Imperator Furiosa?"

She had looked up from her peeling work, and now considered him. "If you know her, there sure isn't. But she prefers you go through messengers, I think."

So he found a messenger, and the messenger went to one of the young women—now called the Little Mothers by some, or was it Young Mothers—that had reason to remember him well. Toast the Knowing was pointed in his direction and came around just long enough to give him a little smile that was a grimace in the sunlight, and then turned away. The messenger came back that night to send for him.

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Furiosa was one of a few now living in the rooms formed next to the lookout tower. She'd been offered a place there before, but had opted to take the winch up and down a number of times a day so as not to sleep as close to the other high ranks; now there was more quiet, so she'd requested the smallest enclave, set up with the rare luxury of a well-padded mattress but very little else, nothing she couldn't stash underneath the bed.

Toast had been strange about the news of this particular visit. "Someone wants to meet you, and I think you'd better take this one." Perhaps Furiosa had her half-baked suspicions: she'd been on guard for the last few minutes of sundown, and then in the empty time she had that inability to do anything other than wait with a singular steady anticipation.

The stars came out. She heard the footsteps shifting just around the craggy doorway, and spoke without looking up from her relaxed sitting position, her legs over the side of the bed and one elbow hammocked in a pocket of the poncho she sometimes wore to sleep.

"State your business." In the moment she'd managed a strange sort of calm, and nothing seemed wrong about the long pause.

He sounded like he'd stopped at an even distance between her and the threshold: "An exchange of favors."

With her back mostly turned to him, she was free to smile, but she would only remember later that she must have done just that. What she would remember vividly was more strange: that she'd been suddenly conscious of the limb, stowed in precious near-secrecy in a satchel underneath the bed frame, at the very moment she recognized his voice.

She stood to face him, abandoning her smirk for that calm he'd know better, and somehow it was in that moment that it occurred to her in twofold: that yes, she had been expecting to see him again, some day; but also she had thought that that some day would be something much further, deep along the recesses of the life she found it difficult to imagine existed now for more than a few paces' worth of freedom.

"We don't really go in for earning the keep anymore," she said, "at least not in that way."

His shoulders shifted in something that wasn't quite a shrug. "It's a big favor."

If she imagined herself in his place for a moment, there was no question. "You need a ride," she said.

He nodded. And then, surprising her with some soft deadpan, he said, "You already granted me a bike, but I seem to have lost it."

She was cheerfully baring her teeth. "Yes, I think you fed it to another big favor, if I remember right."

"I know you either have what you can spare, or you don't." He was scratching the back of his head. His voice didn't sound quite as out of use as she remembered. "But you're the one what has the kind of influence to even ask. And I'd do whatever I can, in return."

"So you'd stay for a little while?" Somehow she was only now realizing this. "Long enough for the parts to come together?"

"Or for me to do whatever is needed in return."

She tried to think of whatever else there could be to say. "I'll think on it."

"...Thank you."

He seemed a little stooped, humble, and she thought with unease he was going to bow. To stop from seeing if he might she said, "Talk a while?"

He blinked, and offered, "Some reports?"

"If you have anything."

"I put together a half-ditch weapons inventory off those with the feathers camped over south…"

"We've noticed them," she said with a nod. "Haven't gathered much about them. How close did you camp?"

"I dealt with them, only much," he said, holding up fingers pinched around a lash of air. "They had a good lot of water, I figured from the bullet farm. They were wary of you lot; they'd taken the long way around, I knew not long enough to be missed by you. Guns, mainly, not a lot of fire, unless they had it hiding."

She'd gone back to relaxing at the foot of the bed and began to tell him how much they knew. After a moment he sat down backwards in the barber chair that sat across from where he'd entered, so simple and present in his only half-relaxed state that she realized the dream had been all about that life transfused from him to her, so essential and non-specific. The man himself was different.

She knew everything about him, almost: all of the things she'd been taught to know. She knew none of the things that really mattered.

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When he left later that night, it was without any further negotiation. He wouldn't push her; if she didn't have a task for him in mind, she'd have to come up with something easily enough, sooner or later.

The next day was cause for some small celebration, as many of the villagers had finished the structure around a handmade basin that would collect some of the water off the more labyrinthine irrigation they were building, functioning as a bathing oasis. It wasn't perfected; most of the water had to be brought in buckets, but it held up finely. There had been some talk of crowning it with the presence of the Young Mothers, but Ivanha, a woman currently being taught as a midwife and doing something of an apprenticeship with the Dag's care, screwed her face up at that idea of them getting soaked up for all to see, and someone else suggested something more symbolic.

So the four girls gathered in a half-circle around the front: Capable leaned and cupped some of the water in her hands, and splashed it into Toast's hair. Toast caught laughter from the masses as she barked and shook like a dog, then sobered herself to repeat the ritual with a dribbling of water over Cheedo's forehead. Cheedo did it to the Dag; Dag went round and did it to Capable. He didn't join in with the vocal clamor and banging of metal for applause, but he did the simpler gesture of raising his hands with some of the more quietly appreciative townsfolk.

Later, after the crowd had cleared, he took to a seat on an ideal groove of boulders and restitched the leathering on one of his boots. After a time the sounds dispersed leaving mostly the murmurs of the young mothers who had settled into their circle just next to him. This sharing of space was the extent of their greeting, and the only contact was when the Dag pointed to an insect crawling up the side of his leg. He gave her a nod and she took it gladly.

Toast had gotten herself a bit of a hero worshiper: Pock, a probably younger boy whom she'd been teaching how to read the stars, now followed her as often as he could find her. She'd sent him off to get her backgammon set (Max thought the girls made up the rules as they went, and they'd called it something else that he couldn't remember) and Capable insisted he play with them when he was coming back.

When he did he brought with him some magazine in a language none of them knew. He was waving a page that had caught his eye, and as Toast smoothed it down Max caught enough of a glimpse to see it was some thick old catalog with sale flyers glued by time into segments of the spine, preserved here for some curiosity he hadn't seen evidence of in a while. "This was Angharad's," Toast commented, without much reverence, as if she'd never seen the appeal of that piece of history.

"She used to look at all the treats," the Dag said. "Miss Giddy could never convince her that chalklack was actually delicious."

"Chock-lot," Capable corrected, then stuck her finger up a gagging expression.

His thread got snagged and he resisted the temptation to yank on it, gave some little tugs to guide it through without breaking it. Furiosa was off talking to one of the mechanics next to the bike she had a complaint about; he had noticed a moment ago, but now her gaze seemed to land over on him, picking up on something. She began to make a line towards him, letting the man make up his own mind to follow as she kept talking.

"It's for clearing out the leaves," the Dag was saying decisively.

"But why would you want to get rid of them?" Cheedo asked.

"I want to know about these gears," Capable said, flipping a few pages over. "I think they play music, but I was never sure."

"Music?" Toast laughed, then seemed less sure.

"It's for cleaning, maybe?" Cheedo was ambitious to play along, and at this, some reaction quirked at his face and Toast, sitting closest to him, seemed to catch it. "Like you blow into them and…"

"What's the little black box then?"

"I think our fool knows what it is," Toast said.

It did seem it would have to be her to drag him out. He found himself looking up at Furiosa's approach as if for a bail-out, and noticed that she'd stalled, a curious amusement softening her brow.

"What do you say?"

Their words were a tangle to him now; he had noticed something in Furiosa's face that relaxed him a little.

"He knows about afore stuff, right?"

"Look, gimme it," the Dag said.

He was looking down and trying to keep his stitches straight when the Dag came looming over, sticking the magazine page right into his sight. The attention of all the women swayed onto him like some light his eyes hadn't adjusted to.

"This here," Dag said, tapping her finger to the page. "D'you know what it's for?"

It was a saxophone.

He swallowed, looking away. He gave a grunt of consideration, feeling his eyebrow tense upward, then said, "I'll tell you when you're older."

Furiosa came up sneering now, as Dag scoffed back to where Toast was the only one sniggering. "How strong is your wire?" she asked. "My holster needs a mend."

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They had sat in simple quiet for a while, several moments after the girls had gotten back to their work. When he cleared his throat, her glance came away from the horizon.

"The Dag," he started, reluctant. "How soon is she?"

Her thoughts turned a little stiff, old anger rising. "It's Joe's, if that's what you mean."

He blinked but didn't seem burned by the misunderstanding; she remembered suddenly just what he was. The man who had saved her life, cradled her back into it with the blood from his veins. _Which is who exactly?_ She was only now getting used to hearing him talk so often.

Considering how to explain, he finally asked, "The way they look at the young ones. Don't you worry about when it will happen?"

It took her a moment, but she did understand. The Dag wasn't exactly finding a lot of peace and quiet these days; the reverence they'd inspired was respectful, but sometimes stupid. The other day Furiosa, showing what she realized had been her first protective interest in the girls ever since they'd gotten back, had slammed her authority on a couple younger adolescents who'd been reaching to touch the now obvious belly to ask if the kid was kicking yet.

"When her labor starts," he was continuing, "they'll mean well, but they'll crowd."

 _How long does it take for the old blood to replenish what's borrowed?_ The question charged like an invasion she'd spotted on the horizon. Wasn't it several moons? Wasn't it like he'd returned just in time for that part of himself to start fading from her body?

 _Favors_ , she reminded herself in a broad, awkward settling into the concept.

"You're right. They'll be waiting for the news...whether it's healthy..." She'd been worried, the thing was, she just hadn't put it into words until he had. "I wouldn't know what to do. The vault is the safest place, only it's someone else's room now, and the women…"

His look was confused.

"Way up top, past the green. It's a suite room with a safe lock." _What do you want?_

A dark understanding passed into him, then drifted away like dust. "And she won't go in there, much less...?"

"It was their home for years," she said, "and they weren't sorry to leave it." _What do I want?_

He thought for a moment. "How heavy is the vault door?"

She almost didn't realize this was a hopeless sort of joke. "That's a shine idea, right there. She could just hide behind it and we'll tell everyone it's welded by the new glory of motherhood and no one gets by."

A glow of humor slowly waxed and waned. "You'll just need a lot of guards, then, and a calm place."

"Got somebody in mind?" She wasn't sure if she was relieved.

"I can't know if I'll be here," he said, after a careful reluctance. "But if I am."

This was no suggestion of a deal, then, just something for him to do to keep busy if he was still around. But the subject was still in the air. _Maybe I won't have to ask him_ , she thought, as if reaching back towards some thrill of relief.

"Would she be willing to stay high up when the day's coming?" he asked.

 _Something else will come up, something more important that I need him for_. "I don't know. I can't see her wanting to get up the winch in that much trouble...I'll approach Cheedo about it first." That settled it for the moment.

He never asked her whether she'd thought of something to ask him for. He knew she'd come to him when that was sure, and in the meantime he almost kept more company around the women than she ever did, though that wasn't as often as someone could have supposed.

She felt less than cozy around those girls, alright. Their new health and ease should have been everything Furiosa had wanted to see, and they were, but it was all too strange to be equated with her means to revenge, or treasured as if the change could be that easy. Any bad she'd done had been for Joe, and now all the good she was known for came back around to the same man. Maybe some time before the days she won't remember anymore, she had not been so written by anyone other than herself, but now she saw the hand-in-hand creatures that had been waiting to crawl up out of soldiers and slaves and felt almost none of that in herself. Maybe they were all just playing along until it felt right, but perhaps besides Cozetta, the older Mother who had survived to tell her tales of her own Mary Jo, there wasn't anyone she really talked to about that.

She did worry about the Dag, though, and not just in the ways the weird fool had brought up.

Was that her responsibility? She told herself that wasn't it, that wasn't the question, that she'd already decided she wouldn't think like that anymore. But was it?

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Pock had an almost perfectly planetary mound of a hollow ball he could bounce off of a fist, stitched very tightly together from shapes of leftover oiled cloth. The Young Mothers took to playing a volley sport with it in their leisure time before the sun went down. Capable would tightrope through the sand to create the boundary lines; one time as she was doing this she caught Max's eye, made a pointing and summoning gesture. He didn't move to decline the invitation in a hurry, but he seemed to have accidentally gotten himself into it just by standing in proximity to where they'd come to lay the match.

"I don't think so," the Dag discouraged her, her look crookedly amused.

"We need an even six!" Toast helped with the teasing.

"That's a whole game then," Pock said. "How about two wives to a team?"

Toast's flinch was subtle, but she wanted to let it go. "I'll start on set. You and Capable with me?"

"I don't know about him or who you meant," the Dag said in a mean show of teeth, obviously knowing exactly, "but I'm nobody's wife."

Looking for a rescue out of reflex, Pock looked at Toast, saw she wouldn't help him more than she'd already tried, and looked at Dag. "I...I'm so sorry, Mother."

"Whose mother?" she snapped. "Whose mother?"

"...I don't know," he muttered. "I thought that you...We've all gotten used to being called things we don't like—but it's different now, and if you don't—"

"So that's my problem? What I'm called?" The Dag tilted her head coldly, her squinting at the dusk looking predatory. "I ought to take this baby out and shove it where you'll wish you had a tumor instead."

" _Dag_ ," Cheedo said, moving towards her.

"You can play with five for a while," she said. A sour calm spirited her off back to the rocks.

Max had automatically begun to fade back into his own space, having recognized an imposition at the moment the insult scratched, but Capable had caught this quickly enough to move after him and mutter, "You have to play now, or she'll think she ruined it. She hates to ruin things."

Settling for a middle ground, he moved off to the side of the square, holding up rounded thumbs and pointers to indicate a zero on either team. Pock and Toast got it, backing into their side, and Cheedo was being pulled at the arm by Capable—"You know better; you can't scold her for how she feels about it"—before Pock sighed and tossed the first throw. Max almost lost sight of the game from looking attentively through it after the Dag's cross-armed figure sitting alone over by the oasis.

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Furiosa was back from her test drive. The four-wheeler that had been refitted for her handicap, with an odd levering set-up on the left front handle and a different balance of accelerator control, was both sufficient and uninspiring. Provided she didn't need to make the yoke let go of the handle in a hurry, or hadn't jacked the elbow again. She turned off the ignition after pulling up a few yards away from the girls and Pock, and their game, and him. She let the arm down her shoulder a bit by loosening the topmost belt, considering for a while.

It would do for now, her clockwork finally conceded, and she curved down off the wheels and set the yoke carefully over the handles after unstrapping it.

"Out of bounds," he grunted, adding a fourth finger to the three he'd been raising on his left. She lingered, curious.

After the second time in a minute that Toast and Pock knocked each other into the sand, Toast came up squinting at their point keeper. "What?" she demanded, as if he'd said something.

He shook his head.

"There's something you want to say?" Furiosa joined in on the prodding; she'd seen the mild trepidation too.

"...You're not calling 'mine,'" he finally said.

The players had swerved in the sand to hear his mumbling. "What again?" Pock said.

"When you know you've got the hit," he said. " You say 'Mine,' so your partner gets out of the way, focuses on covering the other side."

"What's the score?" Furiosa asked, and the phrase was only half-natural, something she hadn't asked since the occasional board-and-stones game they'd had around when she was a child. There was a shiver of memory around the answer being re-erected by those fingers with the same chips of dirt her mother could never quite keep out of her nails.

Once the game was back in running, he asked, very quietly, "Go check on the Dag?" In response to her look that he barely turned his gaze from the match to see, he said, "I'll explain later if it needs explaining."

She didn't need more than that. She walked into the shadow under the Citadel.

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The game finished, and he almost left, but he was waiting for Furiosa.

The four young ones were lounging just next to the grimy rise of hardened sand where she'd parked the wheeler, taking turns telling Pock a supposedly true story that became a little too elaborate to not seem improvised. One voice in their harmony was missing still, along with the one that would always be gone.

Finally the boy stood, laughing and catching the exaggeration of the tale, as the subject tapered off and was replaced with some talk of his "mayber"—This was what the boys took to calling the women of the town that could presumably be but weren't without a doubt their mothers; Pock had two of these, both of whom had had a long look at his pale eyes before taking him under their wing. This was something to celebrate after so long of warning the War Boys off from socializing with the community, accounting both for their violent desire to please only the Immortan and their relative chastity. Pock's one mayber, he thought, was in need of some pain potion, but he didn't know where to get any.

He was pacing around as he talked, stopping to lean against one handle of the wheeler. "Would Hernina have anything I could use to make it myself?"

"She had opiums," Capable explained, "but nothing less potent, when I was helping out Bell."

"Not actual opium?" Cheedo asked.

"Some drug. I don't know. If we'd had—"

" _Pock_!" The sharpness of Toast's voice froze everyone, made them look over to see the boy backing away from the other handle of the wheeler.

"I—"

"What were you doing?" Capable asked, though immediately started to soften at his expression. "Pock, nobody touches it."

Max understood: the "yoke," as Furiosa called it, was still hanging off the handle.

"I didn't…," Pock laughed nervously. "The blackthumbs are sent to get the wheels at night, if they're not brought in, and she wouldn't want—"

"They wouldn't move that," Toast said, edging into patience now, "and neither should you. Nobody touches it except her."

"...Why?"

"Because it's the only one she has," Capable said, reluctant to divulge this where everyone else never questioned the details, "and she's never getting another."

"What?" Cheedo was attentive, forgetting the tension over Pock.

"At least not another one like that."

"She told you that?"

"No, but she said something to Cozetta about it that made me wonder, and I asked around about who could have made something like that, and it sounds like that person's done with."

Capable's face was turned away from the torch light, and Max couldn't try a look at it, but would have sworn there was something harbored within the words: something more to this misfortune she decided not to say.

"She's coming," Cheedo muttered.

He saw what she'd seen, the white sash of Furiosa's clothes slipping between the weavers moving their work away from the torches, and moved to meet her.


	2. Chapter 2

Two nights after the Dag's fit, she seemed better. He caught sight of her licking spiced milk off her smile, Cheedo's arm in hers as she indulged the attention of some former War Boy it appeared she was giving a hard laugh despite his attempts to be soberly respectful.

The crowds seemed much bigger than the population had looked when he first saw any celebration in the citadel. The occasion brought a lot of movement that had started shortly after dawn and gradually culminated into a frenzy, everyone seeming to bring some small thing for everyone: a woman handing out a dozen noisemakers crafted from bottles and dented little canisters filled with old beans or rocks, a large fill of sweet sorghum cakes being served by a man who let the children tip him by slipping little treasures into his fraying pockets, a group of varying ages who'd prepared a short dance to start the night. After a while some very skinny but smiling young man balanced himself up high on the shoulders of a couple friends.

"Oi, men, oi, boys!" he yelled. "Is there a tell?"

"Give us a tell!" came the roar of reply.

"Oi, women, oi, girls!" He cupped a hand at his ear, gave the coy "Is there a _tell_?"

"Give us a tell!" Among the chorus Max could pick out Cheedo's clear high voice and realized she and Dag were now a little ways up to his right. From his isolated position over in the shadows, he felt a strange glow coming off the buzz of people.

"Alright, here's a piece," the young man resumed, waving his arms for less clamor. "I was having a word with Young Mother Capable when she thought maybe we should have us a festival. I said, 'Good! That'd be real gleam, wouldn't it?'...And then I said, 'But what for?'"

The crowd laughed, bustled. He looked and couldn't find Furiosa in the groups.

"And my friends, she said, 'Because there's no reason! And there's no one anymore stopping us from doing things for no reason!'" He let them make noise for another moment. "And there we have it. It's a season for no reason, friends! So do something you've wanted to do and just had no good reason to. But, if you need a reason, I'm here to point you towards the plenty and plenty of ale we've been saving for tonight, and yes it's true, it does have a thing we now like to call _water_."

The cheering rose to a storm, and finally he did see her, just appearing in the illumination of the torch off to his left, by herself, wearing a more quiet elation. Her right arm was crossed into a clutch at her left elbow, her look far away and awestruck; she seemed close to tears.

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She found him later, or maybe he found her. Some booming around on the drums had started shortly after the initial libations and even though he was sure that some of them had been repaired from what was found in the wreckage around the doof wagon (along with the abandoned cat poles that were being passed around for various reinforcement uses lately) she didn't find the familiar vibration of them to be unsettling; the rhythm was different. Some chanting song that sounded made-up on the spot arose in accompaniment, and as it went more and more people got the jist and joined in.

The two of them leaned back against a stack of old stripped rig tires, watching, near at their shoulders but not touching. Furiosa managed, she hoped, to speak to him without conveying any expectation he'd talk back.

"We've had to scrap that refit I was trying to get fixed up for you. But word's come back from the scavenge that they found a good old speed model that they'll be busy hauling here until morning. It sounds like the shell's sturdy, if nothing else."

After a moment he asked, "Your errand boys couldn't stay for the party?"

"Hmm." She acknowledged that there seemed to be another question behind that. "Of course we need recon even on a holiday. It should have been me out there, but Capable wouldn't have it."

Again his response came after some consideration. "How many at a time?"

"One is enough if it's only scouting; if they're looking out for something particular, maybe three." The subject had made her head a bit heavy, slow with less idle distractions. "It isn't really peace yet, is it?"

He didn't answer. Several minutes passed with the two of them watching the older people bathing in the noise like it was a salve, the younger ones acting like children.

She noticed a number of couples dancing together in a way a bit more declarative than children should know about, though. The thought was tied off: many of the kids learned too soon here, while others never seemed to learn at all.

If the rare opportunity of that friendliness even happened, children born between village girls and War Boys used to be punishable by death—for all three—but that didn't necessarily mean it was properly explained to all of them that children didn't spring out of the sand (or come from imprisoning beautiful women and pelting luxuries onto them until their tears of gratitude turned into babes, for that matter). As for herself, she was explained the details as a child and even witnessed some of the casual seduction of male travelers who weren't allowed to the Green Place past a certain point but could eat and sleep with them for only a night if they wished.

But there had been an awareness of how that other thing could happen, something that didn't have to happen but meant you'd want this with this person in more than one way, something her child self had only seen between women; and maybe some of the Boys found it in some way without knowing what it was, but she'd been that determined cold machine herself and never even been curious. Suddenly at this moment, trying to sway by the topic to make it topple over in her mind, she was reminded of something that almost brought on a dark chuckle.

He looked over when he sensed her hesitance. "You know Addy?" she said.

He didn't look sure.

"The girl with the scar that goes up one ear. She's the one over there braiding hairs. She helps me with the unloading sometimes."

"Friend of Capable's," he'd noticed.

"That too." She swallowed, suddenly fighting some nervous burst in her belly; he was starting to notice the tone, so she just set it down. "She wants to have a baby. She was talking to me to try to feel you out."

To notice he was speechless wasn't saying much, but the far glance of his eyes, leeched of color by a patch of shadow, had fixed like a volcanic rock.

"Not as a father, you understand? I explained that you're not planning to stay. But you're healthy. That's rare, and I'm warning you to expect this, probably from others too, no matter what you choose...Still I made her understand I couldn't answer for you," she explained more slowly, "not that I couldn't give her a better idea of what your answer would be..."

The moment stayed hammered down until he blurted a confused grunt, and, "She's a sprog yet."

"And you're how old?" She couldn't help but leap on it, trying to make it teasing. "Does anyone know?"

The weight of his silence made her look back into the dark like the subject hadn't come. Maybe he'd lost track somewhere. Maybe some hard constant fear had stilled him to a stone, stopped him aging. She was so surprised when he spoke a staggered moment later to say what was almost an apology for what he couldn't share.

"Ask me something not about me."

She swallowed again, the air feeling dry even in the cool settling of night. The noise had faded lower a few minutes ago after the drummers took a rest in some companion's laps, and this exposed music of the stars now faintly seen beyond the one torch near them was as happy as it was sobering. Ask about joy, it impelled. "How did we do all of that? How did we used to do it?"

He knew what she meant somehow. He thought about it for a long moment.

"Less crude," he said finally. "More complicated."

"But was crude the same thing then?"

"No," he said, a slight smile in his voice. "I told you. Complicated."

She waited, a brief smirk fading into their private moonlight.

"What makes you think I know?" he asked, quieter now.

She bobbed her leg a couple times and steadily replied, "Because, you're from the Last Towns. Yeah?"

He seemed to have to let something go to answer. "The stories they tell about those places aren't real. They'd come as undone as anywhere, it was just a lot of hoarding what was left. And denial."

"As far as I can tell," she replied, ruefully fundamental, "denial has a bad lot of power."

"But only for so long," he conceded, then considered again for a while, and sounded like he was talking to himself. "There were rules about it. But there weren't laws. You had to do it right, but everyone's right was different."

"How?"

He nudged off of his position, leaned away from her just slightly. His knee was probably troubling. "Sometimes you'd...give a little bother to someone but in a good way...like the way the girls make fun, only it was to see how far it could go. And people had different ways of showing it, or wanting to be shown. You learn a skill for one, you pick flowers for another...you call someone 'baby.'"

"Why would someone want to be called 'baby'?"

"Or 'honey,'" he amended. "Sunshine. Sugar. Little made-up words, or things that are sweet, or…"

"Rare things. But why 'baby'?"

There was a twitch of playing between them that wouldn't go away now. The ale quaked under their mood. He shrugged. "It's better than 'bumpkin.'"

It was impossible not to smile just at trying to place him within the subject. Doing a dry sort of mesmerized, she said, "The mysterious fool with his treasures of knowledge."

"...A fool's knowledge isn't so rare."

"Well, a sweet fool is rare enough, my old dolt," she countered, teasing, then stopped, wondering what she might have done.

But after a perplexed beat, he humored, "No, you've got it," and then, picking up the mirth again, tried, "hatchling," like it was a question, and she laughed enough to draw a few surprised looks.

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By the time it was nearing dawn, their comfort had ebbed back into the quiet kind along with their sobering. Many of the folk would still be up until they couldn't stand, but she made her exodus slowly, wading by the greetings and vague congratulations of many on the way getting up to wait for the winch to come down. She needed sleep for the morning's work, she'd explained, before turning back to him.

"About that favor...Come see me at my work station in the shop, once you see the scouting party take off."

He'd nodded, trying to ward off the certainty that he'd heard some bend of trepidation in her voice.

Now he walked among the more sparse groups that were left, already sensing the different ways people would be sprouting towards each other long into the morning, maybe as part of some definite change.

Around the side of the rock face where the water trickled down in the afternoons, there were hide-and-seek nooks in the formations, the look of a garden maze scorched into permanent stone. Passing around one curve, he heard a woman call out sharply: one yelp he could barely hear, then another, blunt and hurt-sounding.

He slid around the bend, fast, but then as soon as the sand he'd kicked up was settling back down he'd stopped, uncertain. The next yell was more of a moan, and there was a male sound in rough unison, gruff groaning, rising into a rhythm. Not hurt.

His brow furrowed until he confirmed a murmur of warm words, and came out of his uncomfortable wonder enough to retrace his path.

Where could it be learned? They used to do it, didn't they, in a kind of ritual that was always different but at the same time often the same? There was a language to it like a faith that believers and heathens spoke of alike: "lovers" meant something other than loving, maybe more, maybe less. "Sweethearts" like sugar being eaten off each other. "Soulmates" if you wanted to play at feeling like gods.

It wasn't enough to choose or to be chosen. People had Types, like a favorite delicacy, that some of them had never even sampled. Long legs golden in the sunlight, a woman eating something cold and sweet by the roadside with a pair of sunglasses like rear view mirrors; to ask about her name was some enormous trick. Eyes in colors you wanted to memorize until her gifts spilled between your hands, parts of her uphill, meeting your momentum. These were promises like bibles.

He didn't want to be remembering this. He could slip, far along the black line of history into the part of himself there was no coming back from, unless there was no going forward to head to it again. He was always meeting it coming from the other direction, always drawing a loop with one eye closed.

He didn't get to bed. He watched the little world of the citadel returning to its revolution of gears. A pregnant woman, bigger than the Dag and black-haired, was sitting and working on a doll that looked like it had been given a snip of her own locks on its head. Toast and Cheedo were bringing food to the workers who'd arrived to test some early make-up of the winch lever they were adding so that the village could move it without assistance from the top. A small boy took sport in trying to seesaw the platform back and forth.

The sun crawled higher. Over this time he noticed far in the distance and disappearing round the path to the back bridges the approach of a party pulling something heavy between two wheelers. Before they must have flagged the end of the lookout period, the next scouting party was already rolling down a bike.

"If you're up to see Imperator Furiosa, step carefully," one of them said at his approach.

"Hey, mate," the other warned at his disrespect.

"No, I'd agree," cut in one of the women who'd helped carry down the food. It was Shonna, the white-haired one of the Vuvalini. "Something's heavy in her mind. Don't expect too much understanding if you've any reason to disagree with her, but I doubt she'd punish you too badly, man."

Shonna gave him a wink before he went up.

He found her in the most closed-off work area, usually used by smelders and smiths who worked on smaller hardware. The place looked strangely clear of clutter. She was bent on her elbows over the maps that were signed off on at the end of each recon, examining one patch and making some notation off to the side, an idle frown slanting and then softening to neutral as her eyes followed his entrance.

"It's my sad sage," she greeted, but that refrain of their earlier humor sounded almost exhausted.

His brow tensed a little, though he couldn't have said why.

She was rolling up the map, tightening the coil in her hand against the left elbow. "You know where I leave my yoke sometimes, round that corner over the same hook with the cable belts."

He nodded.

She was stooping to write another line on a different page, looking up to meet his eyes, short and steady, and then down again. "Bring it to me," she commanded.

He wavered like a man being sentenced, or tested. He only came out of his seconds of staring in stiff surprise to go get it when he didn't like the thought of her looking back up to see him in a daze.

Around the stony bend, in the still whisper where the breeze was blocked, it was sleeping in its unremarkable inertia at the hook. He slipped through some invisible threshold when he took it up by the straps.

He came to her table and set it down gently in the same place the map had been rolled out, and then stepped back from it and waited. She put her stick of writing ash down, stood up straight, muttered, "Alright. Let me show you."

His hand had come away flexing into a tingling fist at his side. She picked up the object and had her arm and head through, began working on the buckles with her quick fingers as she came around the table. It set upon her body, twitched a little. She shrugged the weight up, and took his eyes in hers in a way that meant _Paying close attention?_ She turned around.

Much more confident than a mutter now, her right hand coming around to show him: "Okay. The pad has a bit of resistance, so the cable that makes it grip can come from the shoulder, but mostly it's this—" She jerked right on her torso, pulled left, and the hand was a rapid clutch. "The flexor comes from the ribs, and I can slow the grip by lowering the shoulder just a little. The opposing motion usually takes care of itself…"

She was turning back forward now. "Now the rotation is more about the elbow pressure, pretty easy to see. But if I want to clutch while I'm turning it in, like I'm pulling a sack? I'm angling to make the cable twist around those sockets so the pull is still there. The spring is double-hinged for the two sides; that's different from last time."

She was finished, and seemed to be waiting. Finally he asked, "What's wrong with it?"

Because he had noticed, yes, that something must have been wrong. He could only guess at how often she used to wear the old one, but as of late she'd seemed to avoid it, like she didn't want anyone to see it malfunction. He had needed this moment to finally put it together.

There was a look to her face, relief or something close to it. "The underhand gets jammed. I can grab something, but when I try to pronate back in, the cable twists wrong; I got it fixed myself a couple times, but I have to be careful with it, and if it ever did that at a crucial time…"

"Who made it?"

There was a plain hurt in her look, and then it was cleaned away for the bitter explanation. "Her name was Doc Lock. She wasn't really known for doing that; I think she didn't want Joe to know she could make them. But a little bit after I lost my arm, I spotted her at the fringes once, and there was this...light, this winking like a coin catching the sun, above one of her feet. She had a spring-loaded 'thetic, with this spiked gear thing that moved every time she took a step, and I was so scared right away that she wouldn't even talk to me. It was raw for me then and I couldn't have taken the disappointment. But...she'd seen me. She talked like she'd been expecting me. 'You understand what you'll have to use it for,' she said, 'if I help you.' I think she must've had many people ask her for her work who didn't really understand that, who were better off washing out of the wars and becoming low beggars like the rest of them. But I said, 'It's what I have to do,' and she named her price, which turned out to be too little."

The yoke had no shine; the metals were more bronze, more black than on the tool she'd had when he met her. This second time the work had been different: alloy from other objects meticulously melted into just the right shape, almost bespoke to her form. It held the sturdy ugliness of function, but there was nothing rushed about it, except for that nagging mistake.

Shaking her head, she added, "I think I knew then she would have kept any secret for me. And the one I finally asked her to protect probably killed her."

His suspicion confirmed, he said, "You had this made as a backup, before…?"

There was distant pondering in her eyes, pulling her out of the conversation for a few seconds. "Considering I was able to find it, it's hard to imagine what must've happened. Someone witnessed her at making it, when it was obviously in secret? There wouldn't have been much doubt who it was for, or suspicions about why. I guess she would have denied everything until the end, but they wouldn't have needed proof, so...The other imperator that Joe set to stay here on the witch hunt eventually caught up to rejoin him and was killed, not before he would have had plenty of time to have her executed and then thrown into the crematorium. Traitors don't get the ritual."

All this storytelling, however emotional, was a diversion for both of them. He felt dishonorable in his inevitable protest, mumbling, "I'm not half of a tinker even if my thumb is blacker than most."

She nodded, a gesture which only indicated she had already thought this over, and her face was a little pinched as she found a way to explain: "You'd have at least as much luck as I would have, but not the weakness. I'm close to it. I need it too much to look at it very hard. And I can't think..."

She trailed off with a discomfort that made him look away. And what if his word was even less than his skill? He had already parried her trust in one of those things, so he didn't speak again.

"This entire chamber is for your work if you need it. Any tools you need I've arranged to be a guarantee as long as you ask around." Her reluctance towards the finality of this seemed to slip into a fragile, hoping crevice. "Will you try to make it better?" she asked.

He remained still for a moment, then moved to take off his jacket. He stepped forward and laid out the garment so he could wrap it around as a kind of bag, and gently bundled up the device, so she could be certain it was being taken away, so she could stop him if that was more of a stranglehold than she'd imagined. Instead she gave him a sober little smile, and turned to leave.

That night he cleared his few belongings out of where he'd been staying, knowing that he might as well sleep in the welding shop. But as he still had some privacy there, he lingered in the early evening, finally taking out the yoke again to set it upon the sleeping mat, before him and away from him.

He examined it for a while without picking it up; after some moments he tested the movements as well as he could without being able to wear it, repeating some of what she had demonstrated to him earlier, careful not to abuse the underhand. He put it back down and thought some more.

After he took the limb along with the whole of his things back to the shop, he hung it carefully away on a hook under a dust cloth, and he started stacking together as much paper as he could find.

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He started at the Hand, asking around. There seemed to be very little to learn about this Doc Lock, but that only widened his suspicion rather than contradicting it.

He clapped his hand under a tray of pitchers and miscellany when a woman came close to dropping them, and then when she appeared to hold shop very close to where the tinker had lived, he asked her what she knew. Though he had the authority of acting on Furiosa's behalf, his command was fumbling and modest, out of practice, and the woman gave a curious rise of her brow at his obvious discomfort before saying, "I'd only lived by here for a few moons. The Hand had a quick turnover. Anyone bein' a bad trade week from selling out their room for food and ale. We're to give the shade to the elders like me now...But Lock kept to herself as far as I know, even if anyone here would be given to remember her…"

He squinted, got his question structured. "Say she'd left a few days before the battle, you know…"

"Did she know what was going to happen?"

"If she'd left in time," he prodded, "would anyone have noticed her gone?"

Perplexed by the meaning of this, the woman stammered, "No, maybe they wouldn't."

He nodded. "Grateful, ma'am." And he walked off.

One of the Pups who was just barely old enough to be relied on was less amenable to the strangeness of his questions. "You're handling something for Furiosa but you don't want me to mention any of this to her?"

"Don't bother her with it unless she asks," he said in a touch of sharp simplicity to assuage the boy's doubt.

"Rumors don't fly with the Boys. Their stuff is—was—war and strength. And maybe food. All that wanting to know about what was higher than they be, that could be punished. And the pups weren't told nothing the boys didn't know."

"What if it was more than a rumor? Wouldn't the pups be told to look out for insubordinates? Uh..." He was looking for a simpler word.

"Yeah but we weren't told nothing," the boy insisted a bit petulantly, thinking he was in trouble.

"Good enough," he said.

After that he asked some of the outer villagers, ones with sun-cracked faces who must have seen a lot of coming and going, trying for what he needed to know about the overall sway of the Citadel. He was later pausing finally to sit in the shade with his cryptic map of notes, mostly drawing from symbols and diagrams of conjecture rather than writing, to save pages. He hadn't realized a few of the young mothers were close by, though he should have realized that quite on instinct he'd sat down in the exact place he tended to see them around. He had to stop the urge to cringe into a huddle of privacy, not wanting to encourage their curiosity, when he heard Capable expressing disagreement with something Toast had said.

Capable had stopped to let the sand fill her toes in the idle digging movements of her feet, seemingly already having built up calluses against the hot rocks baking in the direct sun. She leaned her arm over Cheedo's shoulder.

"It's stupid to be afraid of that place," Toast was scoffing. It was only the three of them. "I'd like to go up there and see if the glass can be taken out; maybe the high ground outside the roof is safe enough."

"No one is _afraid_ of it," Capable protested in a scold. "Do you think Dag should—"

"I'm only saying what good are we if we can't go up there to help make it easier for her later?"

Cheedo quietly asked, "Shouldn't we ask her about it before we try to do anything?"

There was a grim streak in Capable's voice: "If you can get her to talk about it for one second, go on."

A silence passed along the weak wind in the air.

"At least the vault is off the greenhouse," Capable said. "She only seems to like it there; all she wants to do is be with the seeds and the growth…"

"Maybe she doesn't want to have a baby in a place she likes," Cheedo mumbled, and a more frantic emotion troubled her voice, "and maybe she doesn't want to have a baby in a place she doesn't like...It'll just happen and…"

"Cheedo, quiet," Toast interrupted, her eyes searching the proximity of other ears, and in warily looking around she finally noticed him and his spread of papers, gave him a short tilt of attention.

"The idea's worth telling to Furiosa," Capable said after another moment, and they moved on to lighter talk. He was chalking down some final key in the corner of the page when Toast seemed to catch a glance over his shoulder at what he was doing. He looked at her briefly while he was rolling up the pages.

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All the talk was slow work for him, and his desire for secrecy made it slower still.

Furiosa never asked him about the progress. She kept him in touch with how far they were coming on her end of the deal, a subject which pressed on a splinter of guilt even while the mechanics of it were easy for him to talk about with her. She would seek him out once every several days, it seemed, and when it was longer than usual he wondered when he'd see her. When she was there, he remembered words, and he needed words for all the questions, and for the questions to stay away from her. It was a bad circle, but he kept the wheel running and the innocent deception going, with the notion he'd fall off the earth if he didn't.

The job was tough. A few weeks' work had not confirmed but hadn't contradicted his suspicions formed around the fact that Doc Lock's work had been a labor of fine love, maybe companionable love: something the imperator would never mention so directly but seemed crucial. She had said enough to impart the woman was probably wise, which was important too.

Mistakes didn't fit the profile. All he had to form this image was that confounded device and its stutter at the axis where an elbow would be. But there was such careful construction, such time and tenderness whispering from its hard sinews. Speculation, his mind warned. Hearsay from your worn dumb self.

In a way it was both an annoyance and a relief to have to say any of this out loud, when Toast took her nose right back to it.

She all but snuck up on him one day when he was in his chamber of the shop, bent over the table. He flinched back at the presence behind his shoulder and there she was playfully accusing, saying, "What's this about you questioning the Boys about that poor smith? If you were assigned to find out who killed her there's no point asking them."

Instead of explaining he managed, "Tell your Pock there's no reason to be scared of me."

She made a face. "Pock's too much a fool to notice who's ugly. But what is it with the villagers? They say it like you're after some smuggling action that was happening before the escape."

He set his mouth behind his hand, trying to think how he could possibly make her go away.

"I'm just asking if I can do anything to help," she said after a moment.

He cleared some of the scratch out of his throat. "If you can tell me how someone might go about leaving the Citadel without anyone knowing in which direction it was. That, if you're up to finding out."

"Why would you…"

Her expression softened in the slow surprise, and he got furtive, making sure no ears were close around the corners.

He was expecting a revelation but not for her to be just so quick: "You think Doc Lock is alive?...Mate, that's impossible."

He looked straight at her, challenged.

Toast's expression creased in her further frustration: "And I thought all this time you were supposed to be fixing her thetic? That's why she hasn't been wearing it? Instead you'll get her hopes up some dead friend's still kicking around somewhere?"

"She doesn't know."

"And I'll keep it that way, but I thought you two had some deal."

"She asked me to make it better, thinking it needs fixing," he mumbled. "Problem is, I don't think it's broken. I think it's unfinished."

That clicked into place, cutting off another protest before she could begin wording it. "...Like she had reason to leave in a hurry? Didn't want anyone else involved?"

He rolled his stick of chalk between a second and third finger, his look fixed mildly back at her.

"So what is all this?" she finally asked, nodding down at all the scraps of paper.

"Canvassing," he said in a diffident grunt. "When, uh...when somebody might know something without knowing it's important...it's a lot of people to cover."

Her face cracked into some suppressed show of amusement. "That sounds like a lot of talking."

He'd accepted this ruefully; but he could tell she was trying to offer help. He shook his head. "You bring too much attention. People aren't as curious about me and my day's work."

"You don't think anyone knows who you are?...They're not all keen on you keeping secrets from her—"

"Uh, uh, I never said that."

"—but they know you probably mean well. Me, I can get a bit more respect than a warrior. They would think my business is mine alone."

He considered her. "You like the authority?"

She frowned. "At least let me get something out of it."

"I don't want you to have to talk about any of this," he said with an insistence neither of them seemed to have expected. "People might say things you don't want to hear; or they won't, because you're there. Get on with your life and forget about this."

Toast made a restless movement, chewing at her lip. "But I owe her."

"No." He shook his head again. "I do."

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If she made it look effortless enough to work without two arms, people tended to notice the change less often. Drives with any risk of contention coming on were ruled out, though she was fine as a lookout: with a lighter gun she could shoot half as well as her average, which was still good, but she needed practice. As soon as her breathing had gotten better she'd started working at the arm, making it strong enough to steady on its own when she couldn't use a window base or knee as a guide.

Somebody at the Hand made some decent soft core bullets for target practice, and they weren't expected to run short on ammo soon, so she took to blanking off some lizards and weeds just under a click out from the citadel. She'd walked. Once it was getting a little dark, she took a seat and ran some water from her flask down her tongue, slow and savoring. She felt safe in her exhaustion, accustomed to it. When the rumbling of one of the wheelers came and then slowed up on her left, she didn't look over at first.

"Hey, lambskin," he called out lightly, and she gave a chuckle. "Want a ride back?"

"I wasn't really thinking about it, _petal_ ," she said in the same dry affection, "but I'll let you do that."

They didn't go back immediately. He knew how to start a quick fire so she shared her small kills. They ate in cottony silence, the stars pricking and tingling over the dimming line of his shoulders and head as the dark left them the only thing to see by.

He had some little soldering job to do with what was left of the fire, and she leaned her back against the tire of the wheeler, absorbing this strange sense of being comfortably alone and with someone at the same time. The embers made a cloud of light around him, his taciturn grudge against the harshness neither of them wanted anymore both lit within it and impossible without the violent edge of the stilling desert all around. The contrast peaked until she felt a burn of smoke in her eyes, and then he was finished and on his feet.

There was a chill seeping in. "I wish I had brought one of those," she said, looking at the broad blanket of a scarf, larger than the one she'd given him for the journey when she thought she'd never see him or the Citadel again, the one she'd noticed he still had when she got a brief peek inside his bag a few days before. When she sat at the handles and he took the seat behind her, he wrapped the thing wide around both their shoulders, and she smiled.

He'd brought the bike that could be gear-shifted on one side, and behind her he seemed to lean his weight on the left, his right grasp solid but almost unnoticeable around the back of her belt. Only a couple times did she need a quick enough drag on the left steering to take his help, but when she did it only took the lightest push of her elbow and his hand responded at the handle, poised against no other purpose but that.

"You make a good enough yoke," she yelled, just when they pulled up to slowing at the inside of the torch lights.

For once, she wondered at him saying nothing in return.


	3. Chapter 3

Along a broad fire of dusk light, the Dag limped across the sands and fell into the shoulder of Pock, pleading for help. He carried her in shaking arms until Furiosa grabbed for the binoculars at the lookout perch, shouted the news from just outside the welding shop, then sent for Hernina and her apprentice.

They forced a respectful exodus of residents from the darker cells of the Hand, closer to where his own blood bag body had gotten its tattoos and kicked into his not-so-near-escape. Some chains and somber paraphernalia still hung on sharp hooks in the chamber, but in the flash of a minute before he was satisfied the room was secure and took post outside of it, this seemed to bother him more than it did the women.

Furiosa and Cozetta were at either side of the one doorway leading into the chamber, while he stood guard thirty or less footsteps away where the narrow passage became the carved steps leading to the green machinery. There were still more of the younger scouts warning people away at the edge of the top level, making sure no one tried to climb up by the old broken winch off the green outlook. They were prepared for every reckless form of curiosity.

He couldn't hear very much from where he was, but just before he'd promptly given the women their solitude there had been something uneasily quiet about the platinum-haired kid—in his mind she seemed so young—bracing with such a panic, the moans of pain only escaping through her teeth. Cheedo had run in late and then lightly cradled her friend's neck upon her hand, and she had seemed to calm her into it a bit more, but he couldn't have said for sure. He wasn't straining to hear, but Furiosa would hear, and he could see her.

Across the distance that was just close enough to read from each other, her head tilted from resting against the rock wall and looked to meet his long glance. The fear was understood and settled between them, in a less than potently affirming nod, and she looked back to Cozetta. His look remained on her a small moment more.

It had meant something good, before. Some excruciating jubilation painting colors across life. From the wood at the core of the sweet cold things there was built a toy house, inside a room that was built inside a wooden house that was built where water was heard as a distant voice on the rocks. There were things inside the house and things inside themselves, little worlds made. There was a hospital bed and no boy and then a boy.

He didn't want to be here; he wanted to be doing this but not here or anywhere within his memory. He wasn't looking at anyone now, but the murmurs down the tunnel stopped him from descending too far. He thought about the woman standing thirty steps away, wondered what she could have remembered from that time when fate had tried for her life, if she even knew she'd ever been in his arms. That privilege won by desperation, and the way she'd rested on his shoulder in the front of the wagon after, seemed a thing calloused over, like a proud scar. He thought of the yoke, inert under the dust cloth. He prayed, from the same uneasy but glowing depth of his sanity, for the Dag.

His exhaustion had put him into a vigilant trance training his attention on the sounds just outside, for what felt like hours, just when he caught the stirring at the chamber that came in the wake of the unsettled noises. He hadn't noticed just when the wails had stopped, so strong had been his efforts not to think about what sounded normal or not. The healer women came and spoke to Cozetta first, while Furiosa stepped in and seemed to hesitate in the doorway. He stayed on his spot—not until he was summoned, he thought—but then Cozetta said something to her and her height buckled in like a sudden cramp, and he was flattened forward across the distance.

It was with a sting that the certainty reached him, only to slow his approach just slightly when her limp bearing turned from what was shock to his eyes to something else, tears pressing at her lids. She looked at him when he stopped in front of her, said, "I didn't really know I was so worried, but just now I'm…"

"What is it?" he asked.

"...He's healthy. He's fine. They're both fine…"

Could it have been laughter before? "...A boy then?"

"A boy." She nodded, and grinned uncertainly. "Whatever that means now."

Her eyes sparkled and wavered; unable to silence some sense that she needed consolation, his hand went blind and light at her shoulder, and she took his upper arm too in her elated state, squeezing at his torn sleeve and nodding in to bring his forehead against hers. The gesture was brief and cheering, and the fear forgotten, for now.

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When it came to his attention, some moon after he should have first thought about it, that some people working the green were new to the task and could be acquainted with some ins and outs he hadn't covered yet, he drew up an eyebrow, sketched a thick reminder in his notes, and made his way up there within the week.

"Joe always knew the ones who took off rarely got far." A gardener shrugged. "They died, or they came running back thirsty, he didn't care. It was trouble when you could never get enough aqua to survive out there."

"I'm looking for implications," he said. "If someone wanted to leave without being noticed, if it might seem that she knew what was coming and didn't expect anything good from being connected to it."

"If you mean the Wives?...there were safeguards against that. It was a privilege to carry big cargo. Only the imperator or sometimes a legatus drove much weight, so unless you know one besides our Furiosa willing to do that within the same few days...The trappers used to use old covered carts, now I'm thinking about it, but they started keeping them locked up."

"Who was in charge of those?"

"Dunno. You might ask Triv. He was a War Boy, too sickly when the assault went out. He's right over there."

Triv didn't look to be in very weak shape but he did move with a low careful energy. When Max stopped in front of him there was something about his hands so delicately handling the roots he was scrubbing, a hesitant mark upon the moment, and in that space he noticed the baby crying, a jarring sound from several yards away. The cries could have been railing for some time now and he wouldn't have known the difference until he had reason to take notice.

"Yeah, she's not to be turned away from working with her new child," the War Boy said, noticing his reaction.

Ignoring the noise, he rose his own voice to say, "What do you know about the carts they used to keep locked down?"

Triv looked up, attentive, not betraying surprise. "Do you mean that one that was stolen?"

He didn't reply, prompting elaboration without heavy-handed direction.

"It's too bad you'd have to ask Kor, since he's dead. He was in charge of the checklists, though he wasn't of high enough rank to even lend them out."

"Would he have given the cart to anyone?" Another whine of infant cries crescendoed from the adjacent edge of the house.

"Only if it was by weakness or mistake. Though for all his loyalty he was favored for I don't think he was very smart," Triv admitted, with a candor of an opinion not once said out loud before.

"When did it seem to go missing?"

"Well, my old brother Trache and me, we noticed one was gone when we had to oil and scrub before turning in that night…"

"What night?"

"Three nights before," he said simply.

"Before the escape."

"Right, only who knows how long it had been gone?...I never thought it was worth bothering about, but there was some lining us up to ask about it later, so I think Trache mentioned it to somebody offhand. Some officer who was called Eyeball was in charge of checking on Kor's duties, so he got really fussed thinking he'd be in the piss. But then nothing that might have been carried came up missing, so it was just an odd thing."

He tried to think this over, and he looked at where he meant not to look: the Dag was in a corner hiking the baby up to her, her face a turmoil of frustration. Looking back at Triv he asked, "How easily could they have overtaken one of these carts?"

"Very. They're slow."

"Did you have any reason—"

He broke off from himself in a sigh, at the interrupting cries. Some of that holler blinking at the edges of his vision, turning him jumpy, he went over to the Dag.

At his approach, she seemed rough on herself. "I sent Cheedo to go get some of my milk from before, but I've just fed him. I didn't want to say that, I just didn't want her here to start asking me why, I don't know _why_ he keeps…" She trailed off, ashamed.

The boy Radge was weeks old, so he figured she must have already tried the obvious. He lingered in a twitching reluctance. "Does he like a little…?" He made a gesture of the lightest little shake.

"I've tried." She gulped, like she was biting back some utter breakdown.

He let his pack off of his back, catching it so it wouldn't slam loudly to the floor. She didn't seem to bother wondering what he was doing when he pulled the broad black scarf out and laid it out on top of the cleaning cloths next to her, or comprehend it when he tried to gesture her into settling the baby down in the middle of its length. He patted it. Her arms seemed to tremble a little as she put Radge down where his hand had been. He felt a vague but somehow essential unease that she placed him down facing him instead of her.

He caught the flash of vibrant eyes and a wick of yellow hair as he was winding the lengths of the scarf around his hands a couple turns, creating a hammock, and then he lifted the ends just enough to gently turn Radge back and forth. The Dag watched in restless interest: the reaction wasn't instantaneous, but the little sobs did wane a little, and she sighed.

He was just as restless at his realization that she was not a participant, not really learning. He was not going to do this for her again. "Do you talk to him?"

She bit her fingernail; he noticed the tears sparking in her eyes.

"He gets bored just like anyone. Sometimes he'll just need to hear something, feel something. Something calming. Do you like to sing?"

She hesitated.

"Just a hum," he urged.

She leaned down, almost prostrate, and turned her head in next to her son's. He could barely hear the mantra she sang, low and monotonous. Radge's noises ebbed into benign little cackles, and were gentled.

He tapered off the rocking motions, and the Dag came up from her cautious nurturing but stayed closer to the boy than she was before. Her eyes were transfixed on him still. "He's trouble. I never imagined he could be so beautiful."

His eyes darted around; Cheedo should be back. Another glance confirmed that Triv had left, but his desire to do anything but be alone for a while as soon as possible had been killed.

"He does it because he knows, doesn't he?" Dag asked. "He cries because he knows–"

"It's supposed to happen," he said, with such an immediate dismay that it came out almost harsh. "It happens a lot, and you try everything. You get better at it."

"He seems to like it more when other people hold him."

He thought for a second. "He seems to know your voice."

She looked up at him. He motioned for her to take the ends of the scarf.

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He was woken at an early hour when something clunked onto the table in the middle of the room. He looked to see Toast looking back almost as if she was only to be expected there, and rose, blinking, to fill his cup with water from the tin in the corner.

"What?" he finally demanded.

The object was a bound tomb of papers and had no use he could immediately recognize, not at first. A long metal rod with fixed rings of wood on it, some rings numbered and then notched several marks as a tally of something, was fixed like the top of a clipboard to the final page. Toast opened it and flipped through a few pages that looked monotonously marked with charts and symbols. "These are all the checklists on the Boys. Drill records, duty rosters. Triv told me these wooden bits are the only thing they kept on the highest ranks. They were trusted with pretty much anything, but the one thing that got them a tally was if they were late back from an errand. Furiosa's is nine, I think." She raised a mischievous eyebrow as he turned the ring to look, for Furiosa, even with her secret detours to build a deal with the Rock folk, didn't have a single notch. "They replaced them once a year, he said."

He squeezed at the bridge of his nose briefly; when and why had she connected anything between Triv and his questions? That wasn't what he asked. "What is all this?"

"I only wondered if it might be useful to look at what was going on before we left. Any weird behavior...if you think somebody could have known something, or helped with something. Or just having a sort of calendar might help them remember any little thing."

He turned over a chunk of pages to what looked like weight measurements, then over to a long grid of duty logs. He hadn't guessed these lists could exist.

She shrugged, said, "Well."

There was an uncomfortable moment; he cleared his throat and asked, "Was that the Dag I heard down the way earlier?"

Something dark glinted past Toast's eyes, almost too fleeting to be noticed. "She's moving up here. Higher levels are a better climate but she doesn't want to be way up there; at least some of the cool seems to come through the rocks during the nighttime...I just hope Radge can sleep alright."

He shifted, looked through more of the charts. He wasn't sure why he'd asked.

Her gaze on him had gained some heft. "What would you happen to know about babes?"

The cover closed on the book with a heavy thunk. "I know that one is probably normal."

"So it's always this hard?"

He looked up at her now. "Not what I said."

A tight silence came over her, and for a moment she turned the dust in the air to embers with her still eyes searching through it. Then a sharp movement like an unspoken curse. "I used to think I didn't quite fit with the other girls. I was better at doing things on my own, and I couldn't—I couldn't imagine being able to be a sister to anyone on top of worrying about myself. But that girl...she's taken to scaring me sometimes, it's enough to kill me..."

He examined his own responsibility for what he'd just heard, and thought for a long moment before saying anything. "She needs to talk to somebody."

Toast looked aggravated. "We've tried."

"Not someone like you. Someone to be trusted, but not someone she's close to."

"I don't think she has a lot of people like that lying around," she mumbled ruefully, moving to get up. "Don't be too much of a stranger."

"Uh…," he stammered suddenly when she was almost around the corner, awkwardly thinking to say, "Thank you. For…" He gestured at the book.

She nodded and was gone.

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He took a much longer look than he'd planned to, even spent some candlelight on going through the records with no real purpose but to see if any detail from the last year or so called out to him. He kept lingering when he came across traces of Furiosa in the schedules and brief notations. She'd been so consistent, so reliable, enough to give the impression that the betrayal had either been very sudden or built into her bones at the very beginning.

The only other who had been just as consistent was a legatus with the name of Harrison, who had been noted a discipline mark for an unexplained absence very early in the morning just the day before Furiosa's going east. The notes had an addendum for what must have been some halfway-acceptable excuse. He was there in her party, the day they went out, but Max couldn't have placed any of those faces himself.

The key that showed which commander's ring was which was pasted into the back page. Harrison's was engraved with a five, and Max's fingers turned over smooth roundness until finding one fat notch, only one, presumably for the absence. A clean record, one recent aberration.

Probably he was dead.

After some sleep, he went to find Triv.

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At the end of some consideration, the young man said, "Yeah, that sounds about right."

He'd found Triv at the green chambers, but they were now taking some rest in the shade next to an older woman who seemed friendly with him. She was eating some sort of baked roots; Max shook his head when she offered him one, and said, "When you were talking to me about the missing wagon, you said nothing was done about it when nothing went missing."

"Well, I did say, because he sent these recons the night before, see, and it was something mum. Lots of times when the boys were sent out they weren't supposed to tell anyone else what they were looking for; but that wasn't strange to us, nothing to make our business. But I wouldn't of thought anything to do with the wagon would have been kept on the low like that, so I didn't think to tell you."

"But you think now the two things might have been related?"

"With the wagon, and…"

"No; the recon, and this trip out the next morning."

"...Maybe."

"Do you know who it was that took the trip? What rank?"

"Well, he went alone, so maybe no lower than a deputy imperator, but he wasn't my overseer. My guess is it was that one Harrison?—Though there was something else they called him..."

The woman raised her brow, interjected matter-of-factly, "Harrison. That's who they call Ace."

Something fell low in Max's scope of what he'd been expecting, a flat alarm. "Ace, who tried to kill Furiosa for hijacking his boy run."

"As far as I've heard." She licked her thread.

"...He's alive?"

"Oh, yes. She let him live." There was a grimness to her saying this, as if she fancied it had been a punishment in itself.

Harrison had to be in the Wedge, then: a crevice in the side of one of the towers that needed to be reached by a rope ladder, where certain dissenters to the new way of things had taken up in solitude. Half of them were infirm, he'd heard, and headed in spirit by Joe's surviving son; Hernina made visits to bring what they needed, and usually came back with the verdict that they were no danger to anyone, aware of their own benign sad protest. Others thought they were more ashamed than anything else, angry on account of their lives' struggles being put on the shelf. Whatever effect Furiosa's return had ignited in the people, it had not been as unanimous as it looked to be sometimes, not so simple as the sun rising over the sands.

He thanked Triv and stuffed the notes away in his inner pockets, tracing back in his mind along the entire labyrinth of what he'd learned so far, wondering where Doc Lock had closed the gap. If she'd left with the cart and not gotten caught, and why, if nothing had warned her. The warning was the better explanation, but not if she'd left days before with no word to Furiosa. It felt as if some information could have been intercepted and cut off, but it had made more sense to pin that mysterious lapse on some faceless dead person, not this Ace.

He felt himself delaying; it couldn't be helped anyway, since it would be days before she was on her next recon drive, and only then would he risk a visit to the Wedge.

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From up in the lookout tower, the land looked etched with a dark halo beyond the torch light. It was late enough into the shift that Furiosa was longing to be barefoot. She wasn't used to wanting sleep quite this early; she used to be ordered to get by on only a couple hours of rest, when Joe had any old reason to feel paranoid. How quickly the body adapts to luxuries, she thought wryly.

Cozetta offered her some of the dried snake meat as they traded off positions, switching between the binocular seat and the ledge position. She took the seat with a small sigh.

"How were the negotiations?" Cozetta asked, with a touch of irony. It was strange to call it by such a political act—not that the reality had to be sinister.

"Peace talks?" she suggested just as vaguely.

Cozetta scoffed and shifted her weapon to the other shoulder.

"I didn't have much luck trying to tell them any bad trade between us before wasn't my doing. But I offered them twenty percent more water than Joe ever had, for less guzzoline we'd ever needed with him in charge, and I think that confused them more than anything else." She'd been talking with her eyes in the lenses, and looked up to thoughtfully say, "I'm not so used to that. Confusing people…I think I enjoy it."

"That's a skill I can master," Cozetta muttered.

She thought for a moment, about their future with the outsiders. She didn't fool herself that some charity on the part of the Citadel could transform their neighboring peoples overnight. But a simple raise in trade generosity, and long enough with no trouble between them, and then some, and maybe they could build up some allies. Joe had preferred that his mercenaries want nothing to do with what was in the Citadel's reach, but if anyone out there could father or bear healthy sons and daughters, shouldn't they come in out of the waste? How many generations, how much kindness, before they would want to?

" _Agh_ ," Cozetta grunted softly. "My little chute came out of my flask again."

"Here," she said, sliding down to root for her own canteen in the belt she'd taken off.

A movement wavered close through the outline of one of the front torches. A man holding a bundle.

She found the flask, unscrewed it as her hand felt at its familiar dent. "Still sounds half full." She heard the noise that was unmistakably a baby, couldn't think of a man that sturdy who would be holding either of the newlyborns. "Who is that with Radge?" she demanded in the realization, quickly going back down for her hand binockles.

"It's your sort," Cozetta said, sounding amused.

"What?"

She went to the edge of the lookout with the binockles, and for a few seconds there was no movement within the light. Then the figure came illuminated, pacing an idle circle back into the patch close to the place where the half-mast winch blocked her view. She saw who it was cradling the babe.

Slowly letting the binoculars back down, she betrayed her surprise, and Cozetta said, "It's been a couple nights like this. I hear the Dag's in a bad way."

"And she lets him."

"Easier than she does the other girls, I hear."

Now she was astonished.

Cozetta's surprise was to Furiosa's ignorance. "You haven't been concerned?..."

"I haven't known. I don't look after them," she explained haltingly. "Not like they do for each other."

This stated, a silence fell. She took a deep drink from the flask and went back to her perch.

Then, sighing, she asked low: "What do you mean she's in a bad way?"

Cozetta considered the horizon crackling into the earliest dawn light. Finally she said, "There's nothing strange about a touch of the afterblues in any case; Valkyrie's mother had a brush with it after she was born, and that was during the green time. But a lot has changed for that young creature in such a short while: the freedom can even be frightening, I imagine, if she doesn't trust herself so well."

"She has all the help here she could possibly need. She was promised that. Doesn't she—?"

"It's a sickness, Furiosa. Those ones who are most important to her...they're the ones she's sending away. That's what I heard, that she's trying to do it all alone. And then when she feels like she's failed, it's easier to depend on someone who never depends on her, you see?"

After a long moment, Furiosa said slowly, "She would say if she didn't want the child? She knows that someone else could care for him?"

"That black-haired one seems sure enough she's made up her mind. But they're not wrong to be worried; she wasn't told what to expect and without enough help, things get out of hand. Out of mind..."

In gradual alarm she asked, "You don't think she'd do something to hurt Radge?"

"More likely it's her hurting herself they should be worried about. But…" She trailed off uncertainly.

Furiosa swallowed, and peered down to where the baby must have quieted, as the familiar figure was coming in closer. He seemed to mutter something to Radge, which made her for the moment a little dumbfounded, at him knowing how to do all that. She stopped the thought from going too far. "I wouldn't know how to fix it even if they were still my charges."

"The children will be raised by a whole village. We're all doing our bit and our best. It's whatever you can help with, whatever you can make thrive. That will help her. She has to see the hope." Cozetta moved from the ledge. "I think that's Shonna on the way to relieve us."

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He hadn't thought to so much as touch the child. That had been impossible, still seemed out of the question, but it was the third time already and might not be the last.

The first night sharing a wall with the Dag, the crying hadn't been any more than he'd expected. But the inability to gauge her neglect by sound alone, or to see if she was even rising, provoked a growing rattle of unease. He'd seen the wells of exhaustion that were her eyes lately, and yet she seemed to be hiding from help up here.

He was not better than his irritation: the second time he woke in the night to the baby's screaming cries he began counting to himself. After so much time, if he didn't hear that she was doing anything for it, he swore, he'd launch something into that wall.

But after that much time, he got up from under his blanket and went into the Dag's nursery to see if she would stop him trudging sleepily by. In the middle of her own action of finally rustling to get up, she saw him pausing at the woven rocker, let out the deepest of sighs, and fell back into bed. She was probably knocked back into sleep by the time he'd thrown the satchel with the changing linen over his shoulder and bent down into the basket, tutting mildly, "Whatsit, Radge? Huh, little pup?"

The boy was so light; he'd forgotten how light. Life should be heavy as a stampede coming downwind, he thought; death should be this light.

Possibly he'd had the thought before.


	4. Chapter 4

He was still drowsy the next day when Furiosa's recon path was a line through the landscape he could see at the lookout hole. He had a hungover sort of mulling about what he'd done the night before, but he might as well have carried that mood into where he was headed.

The ladder going up to the Wedge wasn't guarded, and no one made any moves in response to his slow ascent. He had left his papers and writing gear this time, and despite his instincts, he went up unarmed.

"Ace," he said to the little man who squinted at him coming in. He got a pointing gesture in response, directing him to a short line of beds. There were three of them built out of flimsy scrap wood; one held a shapeless sleeping figure, the next a boy who looked more languid than sick. The bed farthest in had a man sitting on it facing into the rock wall, one hand perched on his knee and a pair of shoulders wrung tight with tension. As Max came closer, the flesh gave out from the illusion of whiteness formerly given, into its topographic chaos of blistered skin and clusters of tumors. A long scar skidded from the middle of his back to just off the base of his neck, like a whip's aiming to lasso around the shoulder joint and missing.

Max came to where he was several steps away from the foot of the bed and stopped, waiting. When he realized he was waiting for nothing, he said, "You'd be the one called Ace."

Harrison's head snapped around to look at him: an old-looking face, confused, then haunted by some premonition of the next emotion.

Then, the recognition, and his mouth curled up in a disgruntled snarl. His next motion was to move flinchingly so that his back wasn't turned: he took his way around to the front of the bed without letting his hand from the surface of it, sat at the corner.

There was a pause, in which it became clear he was very sick, the pulp of his voice urged up from inside of him with a second of effort. "Is it Inspector Blood Bag, then?...I remember you. I know about you. I've heard."

Max gave him the testing rein of a lack of reply.

"Word has it you've been buzzing around with some questions. And wouldn't you just fancy a word with old Ace, huh?"

Slowly, Max went for a stool that sat a few steps away, wondering whether he could play to some lingering hope of self-importance on the man's part, or if he was only being taunted to try that. He slid the stool up and sat down; it was low, but didn't put his lines much below Harrison's. When he spoke, he was abrupt. "What would you expect me to ask you about?"

"Why would you think I'm expecting anything?" Ace threw back, unimpressed.

"You just think of yourself as a man who has information," he concluded with the slightest hint of condescending praise. "If I've heard from a young man named Triv that there was some business with a missing cart a few days before everything changed...would you know anything about that?"

"...What's that got to do with anything?"

He kept his gaze steady, then looked down long enough to brush some sand out of his cuffed sleeve. "Nothing to trouble you."

"Obviously some concern went around. Obviously it turned out to be nothing." He shifted his foot forward to bend in his knee, shook it out, never losing his poisoned focus on Max. "Compared to what was coming."

"Do you think you should have suspected what was coming?"

Ace glared.

Max waited him out, patient as a rock.

"I could have noticed a couple things," Ace said, finally doing the give that to him felt like a push. "But I didn't have anything worth following up. Not anything related to her, anyway."

Max considered him. "You knew of Doc Lock."

He scoffed. "For instance."

"Why would you have been paying any attention to her?"

"Lock wasn't very important, but she was a good enough smith to be missed. And she didn't make a very good secret of the fact she was leaving. It was just a guess, but: big trades, keeping to herself all the time. It had nothing to do with Furiosa. Maybe I was too distracted, but I don't think I missed anything."

Harrison had not drawn any line between the events, but his thoughts seemed to move along the implication. Max asked, "Did Joe know where the prosthetic came from?"

"Did she think it was a secret? If he'd ever decided he needed Lock for something, she would have had no choice."

"How did he know?"

"I told him," Ace admitted freely. "He trusted her, but he didn't trust anyone stupidly; I was tasked to keep an eye on her, just like I'm sure someone was told to keep an eye on me. I knew who was the thetic tinker almost since she'd started using it."

"So you knew that she was a friend."

He made a look of impatient distaste. "Imperators don't make friends."

"You never had the thought that any strange doings on the smith's part might reflect on your subject of observation," Max said, a grunt of doubt in the words.

"I had no reason, and if I had," Harrison insisted, "Joe would have known the thought, wouldn't he?"

Time to throw the book on the table. "But Joe had no idea about the trip you took after the missing cart the night before, did he?"

His indignation was smooth, but still obvious. He hadn't factored in the written record. "One of the Boys spotted it heading west. I took after it timely."

"By yourself. Without detailing it later." His tone brooked no further denial. "What did you find out there?"

He took a moment, said, "It was just some old peasant, setting out. The cart was covered; I looked inside. Nothing but rubbish. Balls of string and bone gadgets. He was alone."

Max waited for the elaboration, the immediate attempt to backpedal into a better lie.

Ace didn't balk. "The cart was stolen property so I should've dragged him back by his nutters but he wasn't worth the trouble, so I just made something up about following the tracks I saw the day before on my way back from a supply run. I got a laughing slap on the wrist for hoping I could surprise everyone with good news. Furiosa had no reaction. I never suspected her. I didn't suspect anything. She never gave me one reason to."

Something turned in the air, almost made Max's return reluctant. "But you did suspect."

Nailed to his story, Harrison didn't react.

"Enough to not be sure whether you wanted to tell anyone else or not."

"No," he denied cleanly.

"You went after Lock because you knew she'd be easier to deal with than your imperator. Like you're lying now because you think she's sent me to put you on trial."

That got a bitter scoff.

"Nothing to say about it? If your Immortan's ways were still going, you'd already be hanged for killing Lock."

The flinch Max hadn't quite expected: " _Killing_ —?"

"You found Lock driving west...Maybe she managed to bribe you into letting her go, with some hidden loot she had back at the Citadel." But they were both aware he'd been a steady scout. "I'm thinking what if you tried to take her in, and she took her own life before you had the chance, so that no amount of torture could make her give out the whole story. Knowing you'd be too ashamed of losing her to admit you found anything or anyone, and Furiosa and her women would still be in the clear. In that case you'd amount to her killer, don't you think?"

Ace examined him, stubbornly silent.

"Or am I supposed to believe you found some man with a stolen wagon and didn't so much as dump him in the wastes to bring it back?"

The wordlessness took on a sticky edge, both waiting for a different yield. Max could swear to him into the dusk that all he wanted was the truth, and it would mean nothing. He clenched his teeth, working himself into gruff sincerity.

"You know why they didn't make me a warrior," he said. "...How much do you want? Some for you, some for the others? I come by once every few days?"

Harrison's reaction was revulsion: the nostrils and eyes flared in the motions of scrabbling back, like he'd been offered poison. A noiseless howl erupted into his features just in the one second before he snapped.

"You and your anti-rot; it's a myth for the vermin!" he shouted so loudly that Max was up and backing off on instinct before he thought about it. "You're all dead in the earth and you love ours' being here. You deign to spare us so that when this kingdom is burned you can blame the curse on us coughing away in the night."

The hollow was flaring with sparks of hostility from both sides, Max's as stubborn in locked wordlessness as Harrison's was noisy. A static restlessness struck across his vision, ambulating him to the resignation of the ladder as the words were still hauled in that cracked voice, uneasily close to prophetic in the man's sudden vicious eloquence.

"Dead in the earth! _Dead in the earth_! The rot will come back for you cowards! I hope the waste spoils the children in your loins! _Blood bag_! I need none of that drivel to trick my ills!..."

Some others were too busy moving to understand or quiet Harrison's ruckus to care either way what Max did as he slid over and gripped the rope ladder, pausing just to huddle in on himself in that first moment of being alone on the ledge. The shouts still came when he sighed and took his way slowly down.

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Toast was waiting for him back at the shop.

"I don't want to talk," he interrupted. "And take that out of here."

He'd made a waving motion at the book still sitting on the table; she set her hand on it as she leaned, looking at him as he lay down and started wriggling a boot off. "I only was going to ask if you wanted some—"

"Leave me be. It's a dead end. It's over."

He kicked off the other boot, lying back, ignoring her lingering. When she spoke, there was a dreary acceptance in her voice he didn't expect.

"...Alright. But whatever it is that you learned," she said, "you're going to have to tell her."

He could have left this cold with no reply, but her edge of looking out for Furiosa didn't bother him. And she was right, even if she didn't know all the reasons: a malfunctioning device was one thing, but a last unfinished relic of a dead friend's craftsmanship simply had different overtones of who she might trust to change anything about it. It had been only an act of self-punishment to hope that the answers could have led to a place where that wouldn't matter.

"Yeah," he said, and heard how tired he sounded.

He could hear the slide of leather against wood, so he knew when she walked out she took the book with her.

The day ebbed away into dim dusk, and the torches were lit outside; the one crevice of the room that caught shadows from outside tricked with flickers from the high flames. He lay on his back still, anticipating a restless night.

Somewhere from the echoing background, he heard Radge crying.

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Furiosa sent word to him the next night: Cozetta had a sprain and she could use a second head on lookout duty, if he thought he could stay awake.

There was the slightest breeze up at that height when he came to join her, stirring a wing of what little hair she'd grown when she turned and gave her half-smile. "Did you see it?" she asked, making a downward gesture.

"Hello," he said, in the flat tone of catching up out of his tiredness. "See what."

"Your new chariot," she said, trying to sound dry, sounding proud. "It's almost done now. I think you'll like the cooling juice that old boy Odger was telling me about. He's got half the pups convinced the thing runs on steam."

He nodded, managing not as much of a smile at this as he meant to, but she carried on talking with his passive interludes, his mind finally able to go like a steady slow train the more he listened to her.

There used to be a nursery inside the house. In that room was a shelf of baubles and books, gifts for when some blessing reached a reading age. In one of the books there were stories about myths from all around the world, tales of the mountains and the underworld and forces of voodoo magic. On the teeming green islands they used to believe in the zombi legends, that you shouldn't give your name to strangers, never, because that's how they make you a zombi, zombi.

"Zombi, zombi," he once growled with love into the soft giggle of the boy's chest, "D'you know your name, little zombi, zombi?" and the baby did an electrified little dance in his tickling hold.

And he gave his word away like his own supple veins extended, his wrist offered. "Your name was on the news again," somebody said one night. His name drove by across the screen, his name was gnashing fire across some pyre, his name drove him down to the place where vengeance was his only motor anymore. All gone as quickly as the match is struck. They made him do a little dance.

Now she seemed to live in the same place at the edge of his waking mind, this woman glowing warm at the lookout, this fighter he would have died for and who nearly had died, brushed up too near to him as if his arms had been the grim close call. He had known no other way to lull her from the edge than to settle her inside of that name, and now he wondered what she remembered. How much she could make him do.

It had been quiet between them a moment. "Hey," she said, her concern casual. "You okay."

It was a while before he said, "I have something to tell you."

She shifted, like she almost moved off the perch, but settled back into the calmer posture of her shoulders after she read that his tension was the quiet kind. "Alright," she said, sounding surprised, expectant.

"It can wait though. I'll…" He sighed. "If you could come by tomorrow night."

"...Of course," she said.

His relief to just be near her was warm and mindless as clay softening in the earth. It was a solemnly reckless force, like thirst. But he'd set aside his wits for later, so for once it didn't matter if it was a simple night of occasionally giving or getting a smile.

He could barely see her, but he sensed some vital part of her in the dark, and wondered how far her field of power could carry on the highest winds.

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Several hours before dusk the next day they received word that one of the scouting parties had had a mechanical breakdown, and he took one of the bikes out to go lend them a hand. It took a good hour to get there and figure out the ignition couldn't be helped without a second trip with more tools, and he was stalled until after it was dark, when he finally came into the towers and took the south winch up to the shop.

The stillness that haunted the top levels didn't strike him at first. When he arrived in the chamber to see no sign of Furiosa yet he only slowed to let some weight off, dropped his pack to the table and drifted into a pensive spell.

In the faint flicker of light the shape of something crucial was wrong: the dust cloth that hung on the hook above the yoke was disturbed.

He shot over and ripped the cloth down, and saw the prosthetic was gone just as the ominous hint of a high-pitched wailing reached him from the town below. A sound he might've ignored without the other warning. He sprang into motion.

The main winch was stranded halfway, so he didn't stop to gear it up, just threw his pack the drop down and jumped after it, repeating the throws from the winch to the ground below. Crowds now tangled and roared in the night, showing him where to edge through. Finally at the thickest border of the screaming and the sobbing some of them seemed to part away at the sight of him.

The Dag was without something in the shock of clearing, where Capable was attempting to grasp something out of her reeling weeping motions, asking her something.

He bent down next to them, shouted over the voices, "Where is she? What happened?"

Dazed in the tug between one urgency and the next, Capable ignored him, but the Dag saw him and her moans became disjointed words.

"I didn't mean to—!" she protested to him, or no one. "I wasn't trying to leave him…!"

His bones went cold as he looked to Capable's tear-streaked shock.

"I put him down in the sand, out in the dark...I thought maybe for once he just wanted to be alone, if he was like me he'd want to be on his own, I only went far enough to see if he would stop crying…" The Dag gagged on the memory, yanking a handful of her hair into a harsh clutch. "It was black out there, and I was listening to him, and then. His cries moved. Somebody was…"

"How many?" he snapped. "Did anyone see them?"

Capable said, "She was alone."

"Buzzards," came Toast's voice as she'd approached over his shoulder. "Has to be; the west recon saw them earlier, just two, but you never know when they'll pop up from their holes. Cursed ratgut _filth_ —" she trailed off in anger as she threw down what he just realized she'd brought for him: an impromptu satchel of a few guns, a small crossbow, some other tools.

"Which way?" he asked her, already snatching the loot up to get on the move.

She nodded at the Dag. "She came in from the west, leaning north. But what'll you do? What could they want with a _baby_?"

A few sounds flickered like violent wing beats against his skull. He took a brief shaky breath. "They need small ones to send into the narrow tunnels."

"How do you know that?"

His teeth hurt.

She was frothing at the senselessness of this as she marched after him to the dark edges. "But that young—?"

"Less likely to run away, even when he grows up," he said. "Did you see her leave?"

"Furiosa? I thought she went up to you?"

He looked back at her briefly. "She took the yoke. Did she say anything to you? No idea of a plan?"

"She didn't seem to have a plan, except for you following her, looks like."

Something angry pierced through him.

"There's the night nockles; you should be able to find her track." Toast halted as he turned into the object she had not realized was his immediate destination: the new car, set up at the edge from its test run someone had driven earlier that day, its frame giving off whispers of inertia against the small breezes of sand. "But you'll let me come, right? I've gotten better at shooting, and if there's more of them—"

"No, it's not about numbers." He stopped her short. "They take their losses with grudges and he's as light as a ledger. If they know they're surrounded, what do you think they do?"

Considering this, some unease visibly heaved through her, but she struggled against it.

"She still sent out scouts in the opposite direction?" he asked.

"Yeah. I saw them leave."

"You prep the gas and guns and you wait. That party will be back just before dawn. You wait just until you know they didn't see or find anything, and if Furiosa hasn't made it back, you take the Gigahorse and come after us."

"Who do I bring?"

"You'll have to make a lot of decisions if you're a scout," is what he said to that, and she seemed to perceive the global advice of this with a frowning perception.

"Okay," she said.

He looked back at her, taking in the strength of her profile in the shadow of night, and nodded. Then he opened the door, got in and turned over the engine into an anguished growl.

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Somewhere after her bike tracks got muddled and he was laying his course on a guess towards the western lairs, a streak of orange-red shot up to his eleven. He would curse her for taking the risk, but the pursuit had no chance if the buzzards beat them to their nearest tunnel hatches anyway, and they'd already be spiriting off at the fastest speed they could manage, hindered only by the need to secure the child.

If they had intentions to keep him alive.

His teeth clenched with the gunning of the engine. Against the black throat of the desert around him, visions stirred. Voices he had almost begun to forget came thrumming up with the beating of his blood flow.

He couldn't hear it. Not right now.

Some uneven passage of time raked the car up to where he saw it. The wheeler, abandoned just where the shadow of the cliffs might still lick at sundown. He stopped and waited, his senses snapping like kindling for a sign of anything. Many minutes passed.

Come on, his mind whispered.

Come on.

And then, something: a spark of light warming to the surface of the sand, up and just north. Someone starting a fire.

He had a minute to mull over the unlikely possibility that they'd killed her. Even if they had, it seemed they wouldn't take it as enough time to stop, this close to their hatches. There had to be some delay, probably one she'd created.

He'd seen the map of her approximations for where their openings had to be. They had ways of extending or shortening the tunnel panels, always digging and reburying them, just enough to keep the locations hit-or-miss for foes that might remember, and they built up camouflage so that the outlets were steeped in mirage. But suppose she'd cut around them in the dark, while they were expecting more of a pursuit than a race...if she'd somehow blocked off the hatch they were counting on. The flare gun could have been pulling focus away from another explosion, something just big enough to collapse the sand in on the tunnel. They'd probably have seen what she was doing just when it was too late to get to her before she made herself scarce. They'd be too cocky to pursue very far.

He let the pedal up a little, prowling forward in the dark, one hand keeping the night vision binoculars up. He pointed more southwest, aiming to cut across the line to the next nearest tunnel and corner off just far enough by them to hope the engine wouldn't be heard. He kept this maddening slow nuisance for a spell, shaking away the discouraging thoughts that seemed to creep up his spine. The fear hummed its old song. He was never meant to touch him. He shouldn't have laid hands on this.

Then it was almost too slick to startle him, as natural as a snake's coil so that he somehow knew the passenger door knocking a little shudder, after one sliver of motion in the moonlight outlining the left window, was her, even though he could only half believe it: he reached across to unlock the door and she took several more strides of running along with the car's idling to get in gracefully enough to make it nearly soundless; the click of the yoke holding to the top before she levered herself in by a grasp on the door was blunt but quiet.

"Five at the fire, but it's a decoy," she said quickly, "another three of them should be up your ten with him."

He didn't have time to marvel at her spying and then getting to him on time, but it explained why she'd gone after his approach while the buzzards probably saw him too and stayed to throw up the bait. "They'll hear us."

He could hear her settling restlessly, hesitant at her own suggestion. This was not the kind of cargo she was used to securing, and a far thing from protecting the bones of grown women. The accepted risks were barely in her language.

He handed her the binoculars and she held them up, checking a chamber with her free right hand.

"Is it alright?" he suddenly asked, looking at the yoke, feeling a twinge of shame against the ongoing tremble at the back of his mind.

She couldn't have seen his glance but she knew what he meant. "If I'm careful."

He was considering for a time. "If they know I'm headed in stealth in a car they're luring, they won't be expecting a single light."

She shifted in immediate understanding. "They might think it's a biker of their own."

Instantly he put the car into a round turn to put it back east, and he let the speed up for a moment until they'd doubled back the longest distance they could afford to create the illusion of turning around. When he braked, she was ready with an iron in her right hand and out the door to smash in the passenger side light.

After she hopped back in, there was one slow second, him testing the pedal growl as he took the ride into a circle again, wider this time to approach from the direction of the decoy group.

At his first tug on the wheel of the curve setting straight, he floored it. A crack in the shell somewhere caught tight wind, shrieking higher with speed. He was feeling out the dark again for directions and distance, and she said nothing to tax his attention until she announced she could see the crowd in the binoculars; too shady to tell who had the baby.

"The dunes are too flat," she worried in agitation when they were close enough to start itching for their handles and he'd gradually slowed them closer to a barely prompt approach before steadying it with the pedal latch. "They'll see the light is too low."

"Whatever gets us close enough. Long-range weapons are more of a risk."

"That crag," she interrupted suddenly. "See it?"

The boulder was only about three heads high, but maybe wide enough for cover and his light passed over it about as soon as she asked. And then farther up, just within the range of illumination, was their target party. In unison and as quietly as possible, they opened their doors and rolled to the sand, letting the car gallop onward and ducking rapidly for the rocks.

Behind them they waited, straining to hear through the air and beyond the engine roll. Like clockwork, the party scattered at the first realization of the car, but were passed up by it as they rained spears on the shell.

She observed the figures, trying to pick out a profile with a bundle through the binoculars; he listened for them to run out and reload, and wondered how Radge wasn't crying.

After a moment, he sensed her attention on him. "Breathe," she whispered.

His head was bad. At her word, he realized his heartbeat was frantic.

Something startled him at his shoulder before he realized she was holding out the nockles. They were cumbersome at this range, but in a moment he picked out the point: two of them headed almost straight towards them on an unlit bike, the other quickly disappearing off in a run towards the rogue ride.

It was what he thought would happen, at such an obvious hiding spot, but when the bike ground up and stopped short it sounded closer than the ears on his head. In a blind second, her yoke felt for his head to guide it out of the gun blast from her hand to the bike tire, and he knew why she'd shot that way when he heard the first apparition of Radge: a noise of crying carrying faintly over to them from where he'd been left on the wide open ground.

The one who hadn't had to right himself as much from the bike spill rustled his approach, and Furiosa somehow met the throw of a thundercan with a metal pop from the arm, the whistling and explosion deflected to where the assailant jumped down for brief cover.

In the gasp of dazzling light, Radge was a visible bundle, then gone again when Max, compromised by his glance, felt a slash at his biceps and tried to grab for arms. He made a jab into a thin neck and held him back blindly: there was a sound of arrested motion as he was tripping back and about to fall, the brutal snap of the yoke's pinchers, and the body fell after him in a spray of blood that was warm at his neck.

She stilled to make sure he could move. He was shoving the dying buzzard off.

Radge wailed.

Furiosa made a tight mutter of "Mine."

" _Wait_ —"

She sprung into a sprint faster than his arm could stop her in his horror: up ahead the headlight was a grave moon, coming back at them fast.

A blow arrested him to the sand, the bike rider bowling him down. In a tight twist of muscle, he barely managed to coil in where he could kiss him before he'd have been shot in the back; a wrestle ensued as he gave a primal grunt, unable to reach his sidearm knife with the man's weight crippling his stronger knee.

His heartbeat slammed once, twice. In his scrabbling his hand finally met what felt like a flare, the object just hard enough to bark at the ribs as he jabbed with all his power into the buzzard's side. The man grunted into just enough of a fold to be thrown off by a clutch to his face, and Max felt a match banded to the flare strip and frantically ripped it out and across his flint on his boot as he stood and tripped away a few rushed steps, throwing the flare away for the brief light. A flash of orange and he aimed and fired. The buzzard went flat.

A rare bullet whizzed by his shoulder, and he knew the shots were aimed for her: in his quick limping leap he could see her zigzag running, then her abrupt roll to the ground, possibly to cover Radge. He ran his fastest grind through the sand, hitting packed ground into more speed just as he crossed her to run for the car light.

He didn't waste a breath on shouting at her to run for it, just lunged with all his might for the ride speeding and howling to mow her over. Through the final second when his instincts screamed against it, the momentum bruised the wind and then he leapt, meeting the windshield with rolling impact and barely managing to grab the rim of the open driver window as the buzzard yanked and swerved the car.

His weight rag-dolled downward at a sharp turn, all his muscles shaking and pulling and smarting frightfully when the jerks came again and again, but his mind bit down on the point: close range, enough distraction to fire without the risk of hitting the baby.

Another tail shake of the car without a significant lag in forward speed this time, all part of the oldest trick. This one would be slamming the brake any second to get the final jump on him. Against all trepidation he managed to fold his gun arm into position while the other held on for life.

When the brake came in a gutting slap, he was wiped down the bonnet at a slant. Through a grunt of pain, he swerved up his firearm into shooting out the windshield, getting in only a couple shots before he collapsed off the hood.

The buzzard stumbled out of the driver door. The light from the head licked over where a bullet's knick was letting blood by his temple. Max's perception was woozy, delayed; he thought he had him as soon as he righted his grasp on his gun that had almost been tossed out of his hand, but the kick to his gut blanked night to violent white in his vision. His will only grumbled terribly against the awareness that he was being disarmed.

He was tired enough. This was it.

Just as the pistol was probably pointed straight at his head, her furious grunt drove some strike to the Buzzard's back.

Still bent over in his gasps for air, he registered the swift scuffle as she piggybacked him for a strangle, like the yoke had jammed and she couldn't reload, or Radge was close by, or…

His eyes were widening in sluggish fear. She had put Radge back down. If there was another tunnel close by, or the decoy party was headed this way...

His hands were automatically scrambling for anything through the salt, thinking the buzzard must have dropped his weapon, when her back was cracked down hard against the bumper. He flicked and jutted his knife into the man's thigh, and in the shout and flinch Furiosa took the opening to slam her fist into an ear. Then in some rapid motions, she had a clip in her teeth, used her hand to load it home, leaned over the man with his shoulder clenched now under Max's heel, and shot out the brain.

Within the cloudy respite he was reeling so badly that in only a moment it seemed she'd disappeared into the night, the desert soundlessly closing in on his sudden solitude. The ache of that kick let up enough for him to come to a lucid and anxious terror, sliding his attention to where he thought she'd run off.

It felt like a panicked run, but in reality he was slowed by stupor, struggling to pull himself into the silence. His teeth clenched, ready to crack if he didn't hear anything in the next three seconds. Two seconds.

"Furiosa?" he shouted. He didn't know his own voice.

Only then did she step into the distant blush of the headlight, holding in a white bundle what let out a tiny little cry into the expanse and put Max right on his knees in a struck tremor of relief.

She took a few steps toward him, but then something she sensed stopped her.

He clenched fistfuls of the sand beneath, his shudders only beginning to slow as he took in breath after breath. She stood away from him, turned back into the darkness.

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She took the car back to him and the baby, one-handed, the grip tight and instinctively wary on the wheel. As the headlight licked him, he stood still on the spot. She slowed and stopped and he made no motion towards the car, only held Radge with his eyes fixed forward.

When she got out and went to him, he almost immediately moved to give her the child, faltering to ask, "You took it off?"

"It's on the seat." Her brow lowered as he handed Radge into the cradle of her right arm.

"Toast and some others will be coming this way. They should intercept you soon after light breaks."

She felt a first fall of disbelief. "And you'll do what?"

His expression, half readable in the leaking light, seemed hooded. "The others got away. Someone has to make sure they won't do this again."

"...Even if you can catch them you're not in any shape to do that. Why not send me?" She protested, "I can barely hold him."

He looked only vaguely down at the baby in her arm, and then went to the car. She was troubled as she watched his actions.

Something was very wrong. He had been holding Radge with such a detached care, had handed him over too quickly for the relief she would have expected him to feel. When he pulled the yoke out of the passenger side by the straps, it clanged briefly by the door as he turned to slam it in motions of agitation—no trace of the almost reverent grasp he'd held it with before.

When he came up to her with it, she had a delayed reaction of shaking her head in a cringe, instinctively repulsed by the idea of the babe's body against the drying stains, the punishing edges of the limb. The necessity stung like some kind of punishment. That she had been a fool to think it held some meaning attached to her will, her soul. That she should deny it had ever been anything other than a weapon as long as she wore it.

He took Radge back only to unknot one of his coverings, and then wrapped it around the prosthetic as padding. He lifted the yoke over her shoulder as she stiffly turned into it, his work quick as he roughly fastened her into the harness.

"Send me," she said again. "That way you can take him back."

Fumbling with one of the prongs, he said nothing.

But she already knew. "...You're not coming back."

Done with the buckles, his arms moved away from her and he stepped back, turned slightly away.

She couldn't help the edge in her question, a hard worry. "How will I know they didn't kill you?"

"You won't," he said, "and that's better than you'll usually get."

The silence was charged. She said, "You've no time to waste, then."

Something was released from him in a rough sigh. After a small clearing of his throat, he muttered, "I'm sorry, that I didn't..."

Any gesture he could've made was vague in the slightly green darkness, but she knew he made some nod indicating to the yoke. She was dizzy somehow, frustrated, comprehending yet unable to understand how that could be the thing that needed to be said.

Some twitch seemed to go through his body, and he was looking down. "I was too close to it," he said, with the furtive rumble of some feeling, and began to walk away.

It was far more than she would've expected him to give her, and yet her body suddenly rang with pain and regret and thoughts of their idiot's endearments. Her mouth was open, and nothing came out.

Finally as his figure was passing out of sight in the empty shadow where the other headlight should've been, she said clearly, "Max."

This cleaving silence was new between them. She didn't have to see him clearly to know that he had stopped. She had cracked the air between them with some uneasy magic. Only now, in the unsteady resonance of that word, could she ask him to stay. She took the few weak steps to see him half-turned, hunched and struck, in some obscurely defeated emotion.

It was not what she could take. It was not what she could give.

My third arm, she thought. My hand, my rib. My friend.

"No matter how high we build the gates," she finally said, "they will always open to you."

He turned more fully towards her now, and for a short moment there was a reluctance that made her think he would walk back to her to give some more palpable goodbye. She couldn't think how many times they had actually touched. She wanted to feel his brow against hers in the way of the Vuvalini, or in the tradition of something else she had no instinct for.

But Radge fussed, causing her to reposition him in her arms; the spell lifted and the nature of the night came over them again.

Max said, "Thank you." He turned again to step quickly into the car, and then he yanked the engine to take it out to the murky tainted ocean of the night sky. And then he was gone.

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The walk had felt like days by the time she spotted the Gigahorse revving up sand into the dawn's backdrop of grey. At the sight of it she sat down to breathe, giving the baby the next moment to tip into pure still sleep, but he was restless for milk and crying loudly by the time the Horse swerved up to let out a frantically relieved Dag before anyone else had the chance to slip out first.

For the moment every other emotion among the group was halted by the Dag's agony of joy, her body buckling to her knees to take up Radge to her breast and rock him, sobbing out noises of vague thanks. Furiosa watched this in a daze until she felt Capable's hand at her shoulder and looked up at the rest of them: all the other women, a couple of the best scouts. Belatedly, she understood there was the inevitable question, or assumption.

"Where's…?" Capable didn't quite know what to do with that hand.

Even as Furiosa was shaking her head, she saw that Toast was looking at her and reading the situation with a singular instinct.

"He left," Toast said.

The Dag appeared to have some fractional reaction to this, a fearful one, but she wiped her cheek and adjusted Radge to give him her breast, a tear leaking down one cheek. It was quiet.

One of the scouts was Ro-Ro still in the passenger side of the ride, who asked, "Do we pursue?"

Furiosa realized in a second that this was directed to Toast rather than her, when Toast gave a motion to sit tight and came over to her. "In the back with you, Imperator," she said, holding down an arm to help her up. "You need rest."

She wound up shoulder to shoulder with Capable as the ride rocked them home. The girl was crocheting or tatting something, the motions soft and careful.

"Do you ever think about him?" Furiosa asked, an interruption to a tired silence and only loud enough for her to hear. "Your war boy?"

Capable's eyes were bright and close, and then looking back down. She swallowed, and slowly answered, "It's hard. Trying to find the right way about it, for someone who wanted to be remembered but not really mourned."

Adjacent to them, the Dag was letting her son sleep in her lap, absently stroking his hints of hair. Her eyes were distant and glazed, but relaxed. Capable looked over at her briefly, and after a moment spoke to Furiosa again.

"But then I wonder what that means. 'The right way.' It sometimes seems like there's only the wrong way and the hard way."

Furiosa considered carefully before saying, "I don't think Angharad would have liked to hear you say that."

It wasn't a surprise that there was no answer but the numb carrying on with her threads. The fact stirred itself as a silent beast: a long while ago, at least a year before the thought of escape was on Capable's horizon, she'd given birth to a girl who was taken away and then died within the month. Furiosa remembered this well because Angharad had asked her once what was going to happen to Capable if she caught pregnant again, "failed him" again, and she'd told her. As far as Furiosa knew, Angharad was the only one who'd ever known what Capable felt about that pain, that loss. She only knew that that loving fear between them had helped plant the bravery that came later.

Back at the Citadel, there was a lot of bustle and noise of the relieved crowds before she made it into her quiet chamber.

Sitting on the musty bed she slowly loosened herself out of the yoke, only looking down at it after a moment to absently try to chip away a blood stain from one of the digits. But after a short moment she stilled and in a scoff of motion pushed it aside. Feeling bruised inside and out, she rose and walked out, and for some reason wandered aimlessly into the nursery where the Dag slept.

No one was there. Holding her elbows at her chest and standing just past the threshold, she was momentarily reluctant to enter, but finally crossed the room to the crib, resting her hand against its tall side.

The mobile hanging above it sometimes galloped little shadows against the stone walls, gentle phantoms that caught her eye when she passed the chamber during the day. There were a couple little whittled animals she knew Cheedo wasn't half bad at making, a couple glass trinkets that may have hung up somewhere in the old vault.

There was also something silver shining from one of the thicker strings. A flash of light shone across it as she took it in her fingers. A five-pointed star on a badge pin with wings aligned on the top, dented in a bit on one of the corners. She passed her thumb over the engraved surfaces, and over the curious words— _MAINTAIN RIGHT_ —professing some dead authority, or some weightless virtue.

She was about to turn and leave when the Dag came in and reacted as if she had every reason to be there, giving the blank non-reaction she gave to whoever she had no problem with. She came over to the crib, but lingered with the child in her arms.

"I'm to put us both to sleep," she said, "but I don't want to put him down."

"He'll be safe here when you wake up. Go on."

Dag blinked up at her with tired red eyes, and settled Radge carefully into bed. "What if you stayed here?...Could you stay? Sleep in the rocker?"

She opened her mouth, but then looked over to the chair, not sure why she'd been about to say no. "Fine. I'll stay."

"If you have something else you need to do."

Suddenly ashamed of her own reluctance, she reached for Dag's retreat, turning her back by the shoulder and looking, for what actually seemed like the first time, directly into her clear electric eyes. "I know you've heard it from the others. Now you're hearing it from me. You don't ever have to be ashamed of asking for help."

The Dag shrugged away, but there was a new vulnerable twist to her mouth, petulance disguising something more bone-deep.

"You don't have to prove to anyone that you want him."

Something was slowly brought out of Dag by the words. "I do want him."

"I know."

"I do…" She closed her eyes for a bit, her fingernails digging into her own arm as she hugged herself. "I don't know which time it was. I don't know why I keep thinking about it, like I want to know when it was. I still have nightmares...about the first time he did it. Like I bang awake thinking I'm still up there." She looked up as if she could see through all the stone and into the vault. "I don't know why it's always that time. It never got easier."

"Sometimes the oldest memories have the most power." It stung her to tell herself that lying to the Dag wouldn't help her at all. "For me the worst of it was a long time ago, but I still remember some of it like it just happened."

The Dag closed her eyes hard now, as if fighting tears. "...How can I be a mother to anyone when I'm like this?"

"No one is ever perfect for anybody else," she said. "Otherwise we would never learn anything."

It was something Cozetta would have said, but it had been Max who made her believe it. She had witnessed the worn relic of that exact truth in his eyes. Some old philosophy turned harder by the world, in the way he defeated himself but also in his practical judgments of others.

As Dag finally lay down to tangle herself into the lacey coverings, Furiosa noticed the bags of seeds sitting around the rocking chair.

"Arna says she can tell the stale seeds apart from the others. I'm not sure how." The Dag yawned, thinking aloud with a distant calm now. "But she was right about which of the tree seeds would sprout. I'm so glad."

Instead of sitting down, Furiosa let her attention linger on the largest sacks sitting on the waist-high table next to the rocker. Absently, her hand had dipped into the texture of tiny pods in a thick burlap pouch, letting the seed swallow her.

With all that confusing and unnerving momentum now kicked away so suddenly by his absence, she could see now the undefined fact that she had wanted him to touch her. She wanted to be touched, perhaps even in a deeper way than she had ever allowed anyone before, and she had wanted that from him. She wanted to resent him for leaving her alone here in this translucent longing, but at the bottom of their understanding of one another there was only the feeling that they had released each other from the most irreconcilable fears.

She sighed, and willed herself out of the wanting. Her hand plunged further. She imagined herself two-handed again for the first time in a long time, only for the thought of all ten fingers reaching slowly into the earth as the roots do, in their patient and quiet and gentle wrath against death; she imagined, and held herself inside of that.


	5. Chapter 5

It rained one evening just inside the Dust Circle.

He was roused that morning by voices a few yards from his safe hole and looked to see a number of men burgling his buried stores of food. He got them off it with a warning shot, one of his blanks, but was forced to pursue them back to their village when he realized they'd bagged up all the items he'd collected to try to make himself a new knee brace.

All of them were on foot, and he was a slow pursuit, and by the time he reached their camp they couldn't have suspected they'd been watched leaving. A couple stragglers who were smoking something at the head of the camp gave him immediate trouble anyway.

"You need something, old dog?"

"A black satchel full of rods and things," he croaked, holding up two hands. "This long."

One of them had already started for a machete weapon at his side. Max tapped his gun.

"Please," he said.

They took his good manners rather as irony. One of them was running to haul a blow to his chest and land him on his back before he could guess him to be the one who'd do it first, but he managed to trip him to the sand quick enough to bring a stung grunt out of him.

The gunfire was a shock. It came from closer to the village walls, pounding him into a roll to get behind one of their allies, until he took out his handgun and tried to get an aim to blow the rifle out of the hands of the young girl who was holding it. Before the kid with the machete could get any ideas he turned and quickly tapped the gun to his head, ripped the weapon away and then ignored him.

They didn't seem to have much ammo, which was less of a shock, but he couldn't count on that being it for what they'd spend on him. Grunting his frustration, wondering if it was worth it as his aching knee voiced some protest, he was about to call it when he saw the girl was trying for the offensive, marching forward to get dead aim.

Stupid not to expect it. Up this close, she looked about fourteen. His scrambling for his gun was dead slow compared to her already steadying aim. Then:

" _Lill_!" came the cry. "Cut that shlanging! Would you _look_ …!?"

Perturbed, the girl turned around and paused, and with astonishment he saw it too: A thick curtain of monsoon, slowly then quickly spreading toward them.

Moving out of her amazement a little faster than some of her comrades, the girl took off in a sprint away from him, letting the rifle fall to the dirt close to the wide village entrance, but it was instantly abandoned as even the guards joined in the flurry of those pouring out of the village and looking for anything that could retain the rainfall, running toward it as it approached them still.

He snatched up the rifle on his way running to try to collect some in his boots and ammo cans. Ignored by the villagers now, he spotted the girl nearby just as the water swept heavily over them all. She was rushing to help a boy try to rig a pup tent into a hammocked basin. He caught himself watching her struggling to find a fourth rod on which to hang a loop.

After a moment, he cracked the bullets out of the rifle and pocketed them. Then he leaned down and jammed the butt down into the softening sand, gesturing for her to loop the vinyl over the muzzle. Her eyes glanced up at him for a moment, clearly, happily, a little sadly. And then they went their separate ways.

The rain's intensity died off quickly, but the duration of fall was over an hour. Soon to lose the distraction, he started his walk back as fast as he could. Even after the rains died he could hear loud noises of jubilation, some voices cheering from a small farm truck that had carried some of the villagers into the water.

He tensed, moving for a weapon, when he heard the truck coming close by him, and jolted back when an object flew from it and landed close to his feet.

The one who had thrown it was yelling something that seemed harmlessly jeering, and he looked down to see it was a filled canteen.

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He started moving his camp that night to the opposite end of the dust circumference. He needed to be close by for the trade, but not close enough for the thieves.

At his last impulsive calculation from his notch book, he'd been away from the Citadel for eleven years. He hadn't been around Buzzard country for nine of them, sticking to the northwestern areas in a variable half-circle his wandering had drawn and then drawn again. He traveled a lot, though the gaps in between did feel at times eternal, and the distance between him and those towers never widened much. Even this far out, he could bet that much of the water being traded was from the same pumps. The resources were thinned out here, but everyone's mouth still touched Citadel water from time to time, and they seemed to know it, even if they didn't question how the supply wasn't quite as throttled as it had been before. Real bullets, for that matter, were vanishingly rare, and any threat with a gun had its bluff called half the time.

On one of the cooler nights, he was tending to food at the fire when he became aware he had company, and heard the cock of a revolver just as he'd been leaning for his own weapon.

"No trouble, okay," came a strong clear woman's voice, from a height that made her seem tall. "This can go easy, now...From what I know I think you're the man who came up to my mate Blakey?...offered him some shells to melt down?"

Surprised, almost impressed enough to want to get a look back at her, he commented, "Two or three moons ago now."

"Later that day you bought some antibiotic salves at the same posts. I've got elders in the village who need them bad."

"I don't have that anymore." Not quite expecting this to be met with silence, he added, "That trader was asking for too little. I knew I could get something for it off the Cactus Flowers or whatever in hell they call themselves now, over there."

To his mild dismay, she seemed to quickly decide she believed him, and he could sense the threat had never been immediately real. "I hope you got something good for them," she said bitterly, already retreating. He thought he heard something uneven to her steps, but then they faded into the thick of the sands, and in a moment he'd forgotten her.

He remembered her in the morning.

He was waking to the sounds of some feuding happening just close enough for him to pick up on the harsher words. She must've camped close by, and she'd been found by two men, one much older and much bigger than the other, it looked like.

"—can't just go stealing from the stores and expect to get away with—"

"We _need_ good trade to get that stuff, Winger, and Hobey expects me to make do with needles?! Nails and rubbish? What do you all expect?"

Slowly turning his head up, he squinted through his eyes still adjusting to light, and waded out of his refuge of blankets to sit up. Not expecting any particular interest in these happenings, he looked across the baking mirage of day and to where the group was closer than they'd sounded at first. He almost went back down, but then the woman backed warily away from the men, and there was some strange shine where her ankle should have been.

Still and wide-eyed, he watched the group sorting out their sublimated aggression and stared straight at the movements of the prosthetic tacked up to a stump of shin, the hook of flexible metal foot shaped like the presser on a sewing machine. It gave and sprung with some circular cog that ferris-wheeled back and forth with the weight of her steps. It shined and winked in the sunlight.

The bigger of the two men, using the advantage of them playing nice enough with her, was pacing behind her. She was catching a look over her back now and then, but as the younger one said something to incense her Max saw the other sneaking for some weapon, and before he could think at all he'd warned, " _Lock_!"

In the briefest flinch his shout brought three glances, one of them quickly more astonished than the others, but then Doc Lock elbowed hard behind her only to be grasped up off the ground by the other man. She flailed and kicked hard with her good right foot as the other man tried to grab for the pack she had strapped on her front side, and after her kick caught jaw, she then made a hard extension of her other leg that flipped a point out of some contraption buckled above her knee. It took a couple second's struggle to twist and bring it hard enough into a thigh for her to get dropped.

She was thrown angrily enough to go rolling a bit, and was coughing in the dirt when she took a kick to her side.

A shoulder took a shove from Max's bullet, interrupting the second kick, and the big one went down in a holler of agony.

The skinny one finally went for his back-strapped shotgun that hadn't been worth pushing at Lock before. To Max's surprise, she found the strength to jump up with a grab to the gun and hit him straight in the teeth with it, disarming him as he went down.

Still marching steadily forward, Max held his aim on his shoulder target until he made the pains of getting up and running, his partner already having backed down into the same path. Having walked past Doc Lock, he instinctively held the gun up a second longer than the retreat could possibly be a bluff, and then lowered it, turning to check on her.

He found the shotgun pointed straight at him.

"Oh, you think I'm going to trust some mook who looks like you and knows me by that name?" she growled. "You can dance right back to where you came from, old boy."

Looking over her, he knew this was not the practically playful threat from the night before, or her tight caution against those two men, but the absolute violent serenity of murder in her look. She was afraid, and ready to blow him away the second he pissed her even slightly off. He had to consider his words.

"Well?" she demanded. "...I assume you want something from me?"

With a huff, he began the process of disarming, starting with the handgun and working his way down. His weapons formed a trail as he backed away from them, and she met every step with an advance. Finally he asked, "Why do you think that?" as he was free to put his arms up again.

" _Why_?" she mocked. "A War Boy who knows what I look like, all the way out here? What did they promise you as your prize if you bring back some pretty women or nice little commodity makers?"

"I was at the Citadel but I'm no War Boy. There are no War Boys anymore, not like before."

"Look at every stone of you. You're a commander even, or I'll eat my last bullet, and don't you start with me and that hogwash used to rope in new slaves with some promise of...of good morsels and free water and all that shining shit," she spat bitterly.

"I know who you are," he explained slowly, "because I'm a friend to Furiosa."

"—Furiosa's _dead_ ," she shouted, something new in her voice. "You lot made the story too good to be true. The rumors carried the day she took the women. Even out here, they wanted to believe there could be better leaders, some kind of justice. If I'd heard she'd gotten away, maybe I could believe that small thing came true, but all this about peacemaking and letting the water flow freely, I don't fall for that."

"Many people died. One of the wives, most of the Vuvalini. Is that too good to be true?" He let that ring for a bit. "But what I know is that Furiosa is alive. And she thinks _you're_ dead."

She was still tense, breathing through her nostrils, but the shotgun might have fractionally lowered. "I don't suppose you can prove any of this?"

Very reluctantly, he reached up, slowing the gesture even more with a placating look when she made a warning grunt. He slipped his jacket off and let it fall, and tensed up as he put his back to her to pull up on his shirt.

He bunched the cloth up to behind his neck, exposing the tattoos. It was harder than he would have thought to show this to anyone—his mind glanced at the senseless thought that even Furiosa had never seen them—and in the fear that Lock wouldn't accept the meaning of it, he begrudged the need for it.

The silence that stilled through them, with his back to her, was like an unwelcome touch. When the examination had to be for long enough, he tugged his shirt back down, but for some reason didn't turn back to her yet.

Her voice surprisingly quiet, she said, "You're a blood bag?"

Finally turning back to face her, he saw she'd slung the strap over her shoulder and had the gun hanging by her waist. She was thinking.

"Would they have kept a universal donor on this long a leash, you think?" he demanded.

Her eyes landed on him more clearly, still considering. Off-handedly, something dry came into her expression. "'High-octane,' is it?"

He just cocked his eyebrow, and she gave him a wicked little smile.

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For the next fifteen or so days she persisted in her insistence that she didn't believe him, or else thought he was insane.

He helped her see her errand through to the end, if continuously following her and sometimes sharing a camp counted as helping. She did finally find someone who could use a favor from a good smith, and got paid in enough gun oil to trade it for what was left of the salve with the Cactus folk. Tiredly, she offered him some of the meat she'd gotten, and he let her rest while he made the fire at dusk.

When he'd gotten that first glance of Doc Lock, she'd appeared somehow younger than he would have expected, but up close she didn't look young at all. She wasn't skinny like most of the villagers, but all of the emaciation was in the bony definition of her face, sun-cracked or perpetually raw from days of sweating over the molten alloys. It was her hair, a faded but thick fall of brown laced with grey, that still held onto health, suggesting that the rest of her might bloom back brighter with some more watering, even if her youth was long behind her.

After the silence that pervaded their eating, he cleared his throat. "You gonna get some trouble trying to get back in with the Dust?"

"I'll have lost privileges, at least for a while, but once Hobey's cooled off..." She shrugged. "You ever think about settling in?"

He didn't answer.

"They'll take anyone. As long as you check your weapons."

This he met with an expression to convey that was exactly the problem. The walls bordering the village would've been more impressive if they weren't half rotting wood and shack metal, but they were tall, and he could see on the open market days that in some places they were guarded on both sides. He didn't like walls.

After a moment, his curiosity prodded. "What's it like in there?"

"If you like bartering for crumbs with the teeth from your gob, it's fabulous...But it's better than out here."

Lock had a little rectangular mirror that his fingers had brushed when she'd been rearranging her things. She'd noticed and pushed it out of the pile towards him almost absently, like she was used to people wanting to use it.

His look at himself—the coarse stripes of whitening hair drawn out behind his ears and temple, the more sunken look around his eyes—had settled his mind finally into the amount of years that had gone by. He'd fled from time for so long, forgetting that his body wouldn't do it forever, but he was quickly sinking in the same wobbling fortitude as Doc Lock now. It was still far from counting on his deathbed and it was mainly the knee that troubled him terribly, but overestimating the amount of road running days he had left could be a dangerous mistake.

He still couldn't quite admit it to himself, but the deep truth of it was there, that if Lock hadn't found him out here he'd have probably found her a couple years down the line anyway, after forfeiting himself to the suffocation of the village walls.

And by then it might have been too late.

The next evening, yet again, she scoffed at the idea. "You haven't even been there for tens of seasons. That's time enough for things to go sour again."

"Or to get better," he said. "They were learning to grow new things every day."

"I'm one of their best gophers in there, alright. I've a _job_ , and a few folks…"

If she had anyone in there she considered to really be family, she would have downplayed how bad things were, and mentioned it first thing. But he was working on annoying her less, so he didn't point this out.

It was when he tried the idea on her for the third or fourth time that her temper got the best of her. "If it was so bloody dreamy over there with all the riches in the confounded kingdom of rot, just tell me, old boy. Why did you leave?"

Somehow dumbfounded to be asked this, or that she hadn't asked it already, he looked down.

"Well?" she provoked.

"I had to."

In only a moment's time, as she turned over the vague words in her grumbling, this seemed to have somehow disarmed her, at least to the point that she wouldn't ask again.

"Lock," he said quietly, after a moment.

"That's not what I'm called anymore."

"Then what?"

With a look of surprise, as if she hadn't realized she hadn't said, she replied, "It's Annie."

"Annie," he tried. "How did you end up leaving the Citadel without anyone knowing about it?"

His little investigation had been so long ago and seemed beside the point, but he'd been bound to ask sooner or later. He hadn't explained before, and she listened with interest when he told her about all the details he'd uncovered in his suspicions that she might be alive, and what that ran him into.

"And you never told her?"

"My hunch went the other way. I thought Ace had killed you. It looks like he was really protecting her, trying to make no fuss about anything that would lead right to her. For reasons we won't know."

"Oh, it was only a stolen wagon."

"He knew it was something, though." When she said nothing he asked, "So what was it? He found you and let you off?"

"Oh, nah. I was out of the cart at the first good hiding place when it was still dark, and headed north. It was meant to be a decoy."

Ace hadn't lied. Max was trying to remember enough to recall if he could possibly have guessed as much; in the perplexed moment, she looked pleased with herself.

"Not that the important part of the plan worked out, from how it sounds. It was always an unlucky toss, how long Furiosa would have before anyone noticed her going east. The girls had the mornings to themselves, usually, so I thought if nobody noticed the wagon missing till around the same time Joe was missing his wives, they'd split their numbers not knowing who to run after...I thought this up last minute like, when I found out Scram was planning a run to get away from someone who had it in for him, since he owed me more than enough favors to do it without asking questions." There was something more distant in her voice as she said, "I can't say I couldn't have told Furiosa, but...I didn't tell her because she made me promise I wouldn't get involved in the plan. But she was...It's strange to call her naive, but she was really, to think that I could make her that new thetic without it going under someone's nose. I was involved from the start, and I couldn't tell her that, and in the end I panicked more than I thought I would. And I didn't even get the job done. But you know, the woman can live without two hands. I think we've both seen her do it."

They let the night noises swell around them for a bit.

"You laying in for camp here?" she asked.

Max was deep in thought.

"Well, you snore on your back," she said, shrugging and shifting herself to lie down. "Just so you know."

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He never fell asleep quickly. That night the stars above were heavy and questioning as he gazed up at them properly for the first time in a while.

Something was coming back to him in sudden, elusive epiphany. His mind had set off on it somehow, just with this talking and thinking about these old happenings, or maybe with Annie's correction on her name earlier.

He realized that night that he'd misremembered that mythology from the old book. It wasn't that giving your name out made people able to hold power over you, enslave you. It was when they renamed you, took away your true name, that you were reshaped to their will. His unconscious musing foolishness had all been to justify that fear of his true nature, when his own name should have been a talisman, blazing in the dark to ward away wrong. He should have tried harder to keep those memories alive inside of him.

The rains might be coming back. The world might be replenished, slowly, as if it were rethinking its abandonment of mankind's blood and greed now that a few days' peace was possible. It was a hope they all treasured very privately, but you could see it in everyone, and sometimes with the unease, like it could all be spoiled in a moment. He wasn't stupid enough to believe that the kindnesses towards each other could sink through them to another generation, nurturing the very earth; he would be no father, figuratively or otherwise. But the Citadel was now his own Green Place, and to deny that hope was a betrayal he could not live with anymore.

His voice had gone stale, and he pushed past a scratch in it to mutter, "Annie?"

"...Huh," she confirmed.

He smiled uncomfortably through the black air edged by firelight. "My name's Max."

"...Oh." He heard her rolling onto her other side. She was silent for a long while, and he was sure she must have fallen asleep, when she said, "You know, I never knew Furiosa to trust a man...Not with the things you seem to know."

He would have thought that was another challenge to his honesty, but there had been something changing in her eyes when he'd given her some of the details earlier, like she was seeing him for the first time. Like he'd been finally proving something to her now that he was done trying to.

He heard another shifting noise and could see over the last embers that she had sat up and was thinking hard, wiping her hand over her eyes. She had been with him this whole time, awake, thinking. When she spoke again there was a rueful, just barely optimistic complaint to her voice.

"We would never make it before the driest season," she said, shaking her head. "If we ran out of water before then…"

"'Go south for water,'" he said, a passive reminder of the common advice that everyone heard but only some believed.

"Or if we made one mistake."

"We might, but." He pushed himself up off the sand. "About thirty kilometers south I've got a four-seater tucked away. Long as no one else has noticed the marker I can dig it up and get it running. We'd never get enough fuel to take us all the way, but it would buy us some time."

"The gas is no small problem. They've got something for the hunting trucks over at the village, but that's nothing to do with the gophers."

"I thought you were a thief."

She was silent another moment, and sighed heavily. "And to what end, if the Dusters catch me...I've got this one journey left in me, and that's if I'm lucky. It's a lot of risk for what's already a gamble, mate."

He let her think it over.

"And I suppose it's true what I suspected...that you never had any plans about returning until you came across old me?"

After a moment, he flatly said, "The plan is I get you there."

In the quiet of the night, their thoughts strayed together over the expanse of the land, nursed and worried at the pains of it, but at the end, for him, was a light of promise, a yearning he thought he had forgotten. His heart felt like a burn in his chest.

"...It's time, isn't it?" she asked, finally, with something daring to accept this even if it was a misshapen object, not yet hope. Wording the audacity of it fully, she dared, "We go all the way back?"

He saw his own circle with open eyes, imagined its final closing. "We go back."


	6. Epilogue

It was night when they first neared the Citadel enough to dimly make out the tall rocks, and he woke in the morning to Annie laughing and shaking his shoulder until he rose to get a real look at it, and the sight was the type of miracle a man could choke on.

Hard to tell from the distance what was what, but it now looked to be a mossy pillar of green bordered at the ground level by trees both young and old, the village now an expanse of tarps that must have been housing twice the amount of folk as before. There were still no walls.

He could feel Annie's look at him like she was trying to measure whether he was as spellbound as she was.

"Do you think they've gotten more rain?" she asked.

He was trying to be grumpy with her for waking him far too early, but they fell into quiet smiles. "Come on," he said, pushing himself off the ground.

By dusk they were under the shade of the first tree. Annie had been teasing him for looking nervous, and she wasn't entirely wrong. It was always possible that the person they'd come for wouldn't be here; neither of them had been willing to mention this fact during the journey. But aside from that fear, there was something else, something Annie would not be feeling. Furiosa had told him he would always be welcome, but that was when she hadn't believed he would come back, and a long time ago now.

He was surprised that there was no immediate entourage of examination, friendly or otherwise. Surely someone was on the lookout duty and had been interested in their approach. It was only when they stopped walking, reluctant to go on uninvited, that someone moved to greet them, getting up from a small group lazing on a quilt. Max was scanning faces for anyone he'd recognize, and only realized when the man came up closer that he did know him as the thin young good-humored type who had announced the festival that night, all those humorless nights ago.

It was Annie he got a shocked look at. "Oh, little Hec," she was saying to him, grinning. "You're so grown now."

"You look just the same," he said, and went in to embrace her. "I thought we'd seen the last of you."

Max was absently taking a few steps closer to two kids who were playing some variation of hopscotch close to a kind of bramble bush. One of them was a remarkably striking boy who looked ten or eleven, maybe twelve. Skin pale as porcelain and a shrugged-back head of flowing yellow hair. As the boy looked over at him, the eyes struck him, profoundly familiar.

"Are you new?" the other child, a younger girl, asked, and Max gave her a mysterious shrug. She let out some puzzled laughter, turning to whisper something in the boy's ear.

They were both turning back to their game, when he said, "Radge…?"

Confused yet lazily obedient, the boy turned and walked up to him. "...You know me, sir?"

"Uh…" He scratched his hair, overwhelmed somehow. "When you were very small. I knew the Dag...a long time ago."

"The what?"

"...What?"

"Who?"

Suddenly uncertain, he said, "The Dag _._ Your mother _._ "

Radge said confidently, "My mother is the Keeper of the Seeds."

"...Oh." He felt a slow smile breaking from inside of him. "Of course."

Someone was approaching quickly now at his left, and a touch of wariness turned to a different smile when he recognized an older Toast by her restrained elation, her head shaking in an agitation of disbelief.

"I was up at the lookout tower and I thought that just might be you but I had to come down here and…" She laughed in amazement.

Neither of them found anything to say until he asked, "Aren't you going to tell me I haven't aged a day?"

She scoffed. "No."

He smirked warmly, but then she got serious.

"Do you know who this is, Radge?"

The boy squinted between the two of them, and Toast pulled him in at the shoulders.

"You've been told the story, about the man who helped Furiosa rescue you from the Buzzards? That same man who helped me and your mother?" She nodded at Max. "That's this man."

The boy's face changed into something older, more tender with respect. Max was about to brush this away, but then Radge reached for his hand, squeezed it, and leaned in to kiss it, and he was touched into speechlessness until the brief but firm gesture was over.

It was Toast now who reached to embrace him, which he was just as unprepared for, certain that she'd never have done this in her twenties. But as he leaned down to allow the reach of her arms he managed to say quietly into her ear, "Is she alive?"

"Yes, and she's well," she answered, stepping back and looking him over still, gauging his relief with a twitch at her mouth. "I didn't tell anyone when I thought I might've seen you. She's giving someone a lesson. I could take you to her."

He said carefully, "There's someone else who should really see her first."

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They had finally let the wind blow the ghosts out of the vault and turned the main atrium into a library. Furiosa was apparently giving some tough one-on-one tutoring about navigational maths to an aspiring scout, but she was sending him away for the day when Max approached the entrance with Annie, who had gone as quiet as he was at the first carrying mutters of her voice perceptible through the conversations of the workers milling busily around the greenhouse.

Annie reached to touch his arm, a wordless thanks, as no doubt she was thinking about the fact that she'd actually had to be convinced to come back here. He nodded her onward, staying just around the corner of the round threshold, but unable to help peeking around it as soon as Annie had gone in.

Her back was to them, and the first surprise was the plait of shady gold hair that hung down between her shoulder blades. She was sitting in one of the pupil chairs, her stump arm idle over the back of it, the skirt of some sarong of dark grey cloth falling to her bared ankles.

Annie was several steps in, closer to her than to the entrance, and he finally heard her quietly trying Furiosa's name.

Furiosa looked over her shoulder, neutrally attentive, then surprised. Some words almost left her mouth, but were cut off by her own uncertainty.

It was as she rose from the chair that recognition seemed to finally strike her. Her mouth dropped, and some exclamation came pouring out just as Annie moved to embrace her, and it was somehow not the hold he'd expected: Furiosa dipping her head into the bed of a shoulder, taking more than giving the comforting touch, the strokes to her hair. They were both crying.

Annie finally broke away, and under the now echoing din of the greenhouse he could barely hear them, but gathered some affectionate observations of each other's changes, with Annie stroking the stray bangs at Furiosa's forehead. He was all the way into the doorway now, waiting and watching. Furiosa pressed eagerly to ask Annie something, and Annie answered, and might have tossed her head just slightly over her own shoulder. Furiosa went still in disbelief. He caught her mouthing nothing but his name.

No amount of painfully nurtured longing could have made him expect the soft power she still held over him. There were streaks of subtle white in her hair, crow's feet lining her eyes. In every observation there was a lax health to her that brought her image forward to him, stunning in its realities he couldn't have drawn up in his mind.

Her old posture intact, she stood there without weapons, with tears in her eyes, gorgeously amazed, and nothing could have prepared him for the sight of her as her face fell into something else, as she looked around for him.

.

.

.

.

He rose up out of his submerging, letting his breath out and shaking soaked hair back off his eyes.

His spine lounged back into the sizable basin; it was probably the biggest they had, but she'd insisted on him using it with a teasing remark that he obviously hadn't had a bath in a very long time.

While it had its public uses it was also the most private, tucked inside a circle of curtains close to that chamber where the Dag had had Radge all those years ago, with a thick vein of clay pipe connecting it to the remarkable pressure sanitation system they had now. It was closed off by the cloth, but as soon as the water stopped ringing in his ears he was picking up the echoes from other levels, the bouncing murmurs that came around the opening on the winch side. He had forgotten how small the tower really seemed with its lack of solid doors, in the exposing hush after some had gone to bed.

It sounded like Annie and Furiosa were in her chamber, talking around the object or subject of the yoke, which Annie had happily promised to finish; and which, surprisingly, Furiosa had had to be reminded of to even bring out in the first place. ("You know," she'd said with distant hesitation, "I don't really end up needing it much anymore.") Their rhythms sounded eager, constantly diverting to one story or another. He heard himself mentioned a couple times along trains of unintelligible words.

He heard a full and fierce laugh and was certain he had won that from her once, on some ancient night when they'd forgotten themselves.

The water settled and almost stilled. He should have laughed or sobbed, at all this mundanity. The slightest breeze brushing noises against the bath curtains as someone mentioned him so idly, his body naked and pruning, and maybe him shivering a little, because there was a woman.

He'd sensed they had both been vaguely relieved when the Dag stole her moment with him just outside the library. Furiosa had approached him in quiet dismay, looking him up and down, and then seemed just on the brink of reaching out, maybe to press her head to his in that one way she'd ever so deliberately touched him before, before the dry exclamation came as a greeting from the Dag reaching out a dirt-smeared hand to press a touch to his sleeve, and then the more fervent shock had passed. There was quite a gathering in the greenhouse as rumors of some miraculous return went flying and Annie had a couple other reunions of her own, and then everything was as joyful and flurried as a wedding after that, allowing so much warmth but not much span for anything kept at a whisper.

His baptism finished with, he slipped back into his clothes, and in a moment he went down to the level below.

He expected Annie to still be in there with her, only realizing she wasn't when it was strictly quiet outside the curtain over her threshold that billowed ghostly in a grasp of wind. There was a small sash of opening in the cloths; he dared a look through it, catching a hint of movement.

"I hear you," came her assuring call from inside, sounding altogether collected except for something at the bottom of her voice. "You can come in here."

The room was richer with color now but only in a few subtle ways. She was turning away from arranging something on the small shelf close by the bed and the darker shade on her had changed with her clothing; there had been some comments from Annie that she'd meant to make the new yoke more slimline around the padding, more ideal for wearing under rather than over clothes, and Furiosa had apparently demonstrated this by changing into a muslin shift without removing the arm. It was a strange sight: the sleeves went just past her elbows, obscuring the place where her own arm ended, and the loose long gap at the top held together by lacing mostly covered the leathers. He wondered if she'd sent Annie off to sleep for the night, what she'd been about to do before he came in.

"Will you sit?" she asked, turning back to finish what looked like a quick job of sweeping away some things that might have been cluttering the mattress a moment before. There was nowhere to sit but there, so he took the foot of the bed. Turning and now walking over to him, she smirked, indicating a smooth shake of a motion with the prosthetic. "It was like she could pick up right where she left off without any hesitation...You got the job done for me, one way or the other."

With this she made the yoke extend out to him as if to shake on it. His hand which had been feeling down his clean hair now fell to where his elbow twitched at his lap, reluctant. She was so close, closer than the gesture required.

There was a pause. "You don't shake with your dominant hand?" he dared.

Her smile fell, the green eyes going softer, and the yoke went slack, like a weight she wasn't quite accustomed to anymore. Something trembled between them. His eyes looked up into hers, solid with intention.

The first touch to the inside of her right arm was as light as if her skin there was a ribbon just catching wind and landing only in fleeting contact, like he was curving his hand to pick up a butterfly. Further down, at the soft underside of her forearm, the touch held, and he was aware of a slight catch in her chest's rising as his grasp slid down to close around her hand. He turned the back of it up to his mouth, firmly, his eyes closing in some long-sought sleep as he kissed there and then turned his cheek into her skin with the most impossible sigh.

He could hear that the weight of her breath matched his. They stayed that way for half of a minute. Finally he whispered, "Forgive me."

He looked up, releasing her hand, and she was shaking her head, but there was the slightest uncertainty. "You're here..."

He let her voice trail away, then promised, "I'm here."

She appeared to make a reaching motion before her arms were stopped short, floundering ruefully in the sharp object that seemed between them now. His hands reached up slowly until a clear-eyed look and a nod from her told him: no permission had ever been rescinded.

She had a layer of thin gauze material underneath the harness, but his fingers brushed warmth, the fine declaration of her collarbone, as he loosened the laces to push the blouse aside enough to reach in and work at the small buckles. Unfastening them swiftly enough, he shifted the harness up from her ribs and she lifted her arm and helped her hair through the loop as he lifted it over her head. She seemed more restless to be out of the socket with every movement, and as soon as the weight of the pylon made the leather slip down from her shoulder he found his head and hair cradled in that crook of her arm, his face in the refuge of her chest and neck. Metal rattled sturdily onto the stone floor, and his arms closed around her, one hand finding the scarred space at the back of her neck when she squeezed him so closely she was leaning and falling into his arms.

Carefully, reverently, their hands journeyed for skin. They found a bounty.

.


End file.
